Without CHIP renewal, 84,000 Alabama children could lose insurance Feb. 1

Montgomery Advertiser (AL)

Dec. 07--Some 84,000 Alabama children could lose their health insurance at the beginning of February if Congress doesn't renew funding for a popular health insurance program.

Cathy Caldwell, the director of the state's ALL Kids program, said Thursday that if Congress doesn't find money for the Children's Health Insurance Program, ALL Kids will begin mailing letters out to recipients Dec. 26 alerting them to the possible end of the program.

New enrollments in the program would be frozen on Jan. 1. Without further action, the program would drop current recipients on Feb. 1.

"I hope to goodness we don't have to do that," Caldwell said Thursday. "But if funding's not continued, we'll have to do these things."

CHIP funding in Alabama is divided among ALL Kids and the Alabama Medicaid Agency, where it covers about 70,000 children. ALL Kids provides insurance for children up to the age 19 who live in households making up to 312 percent of the poverty line -- up to $50,688 a year for a household of two, and up to $63,710 a year for a household of three.

Recipients must be residents of Alabama and otherwise uninsured. Those who qualify pay premiums ranging from $52 to $104 a year, depending on income, and also pay co-pays.

Nationwide, CHIP covers about 9 million children, and the program is credited with large drops in the numbers of uninsured children in the country. For the past two years, Congress has funded the program in such a way as to pick up the full $200 million tab for Alabama's program.

But Congress missed a deadline to renew the program on Sept. 30. The chambers have separate proposals dealing with renewal; the House version of renewal includes funding measures like higher premiums on Medicare recipients making $500,000 a year or more. The Senate version does not include offsets.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a continuing resolution to allow a temporary CHIP fix, though a long-term solution has not been settled. U.S. Rep. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery, said in a statement Thursday that the Senate "needs to take this seriously."

"They can either take up our House-passed bill and send it to the President or pass one of their own so we can work out a compromise," the statement said. "But, this is going to become a real problem and doing nothing is not an option."

In the Senate race, Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones has called on Congress to renew the program. In a statement Thursday, the Jones campaign said the loss of ALL Kids would be "an economic and health care disaster for the families of these children" and called on Congress to "act now to avoid the tragedy of children losing health care coverage," while criticizing Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore.

"It is appalling Roy Moore refuses to say whether he would support the program, endangering the care of 10s of thousands of Alabama children," the statement said.

Moore's campaign has said in the past he will have to review CHIP renewal proposals before he can commit to it. The campaign Thursday didn't say what Moore would do with CHIP, instead reiterating Moore's opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

"The CHIP debate is a great example of what happens when we put our healthcare decisions in the hands of federal bureaucrats and politicians," the statement said. "We need to repeal Obamacare, repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act and turn these decisions back to parents and patients in the 50 states."

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