EDITORIAL: Semi-good news on kids’ health care program in Missouri. Why not share it?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)

Jan. 18--For at least 25,000 Missouri children and their parents, the question of when their coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program could end is a matter of pressing consequence. Will it be at the end of February, as a study by Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute estimates? Or the end of March, as the Medicaid and CHIP Access Commission reckons? Or is it June, as the state official in charge of the program told a conference in December?

When the Post-Dispatch's Samantha Liss put the question to the state Department of Social Services, she got a vague but encouraging emailed reply: "CHIP ending is not an imminent issue in Missouri."

Maybe Congress will end the suspense by Friday, when a stopgap federal spending bill expires. It contains $2.85 billion intended to fund CHIP through March, but if authorization to spend it expires, the money will be frozen.

A five-year reauthorization has been in limbo since Sept. 30 because Congress was too busy passing a $1 trillion tax cut to get around to health care for 9 million kids.

CHIP enjoys broad bipartisan support and could easily pass if it came to the floor by itself, unburdened by more divisive political issues. In the meantime, it's not too much to expect the state of Missouri to provide parents as much certainty as possible. "Not an imminent issue" is not good enough.

Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, like his Democratic predecessor, Gov. Jay Nixon, keeps a tight cork in the flow of public information. Department officials and employees are generally forbidden from speaking to the news media. Greitens, even before his recent troubles, took matters to an extreme, stiffing reporters himself on a regular basis and employing a press secretary who rarely returns calls.

The problem with public servants shutting out the media is that they shut out the public, too, until such time as an officially scrubbed version of the news is released through the governor's office or Facebook page. Ironically, in the case of CHIP funding, the administration is hiding what appear to be smart actions.

On Dec. 12, Jennifer Tidball, the acting director of MO HealthNet, the official name of the state Medicaid program, told a meeting of the program's oversight committee that the state budgeted for the possibility that federal funds might be held up. Those funds pay for 97 percent of CHIP funding. The state figured it might need to pay a 26 percent share this year instead of the usual 3 percent. As a result, the state can make it until June, Tidball told the group.

There are some competent people working in the Greitens administration making smart decisions. The governor is now in a place where he doesn't have to care who gets the credit. He should turn them loose.

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