A Note on CHIP

Let me venture out of the state boundaries for a moment to talk about a national issue, the CHIP bill, which the president vetoed today.

I have few regrets in life. The list probably should be longer than it is. Most are vague and emotional, like wishing I had spent more time with my grandfather and coaxed a few more stories out of him. Very few relate to specific incidents.

However, there is one sin of omission that has stayed with me for over 20 years and is etched very clearly in my memory. It was the early or mid-1980’s. I was working and going to graduate school. ATM machines were around but the cards weren’t used as debit cards yet; credit was not easy to come by. One evening I was out at a clinic, a doc in the box, as we called them, but don’t remember why I was there. A woman came in carrying a little girl, probably 3 or 4 years old. The cashier was behind a plexiglass panel with an opening at the bottom to pass money or paper through. The woman with the child hurried up to the window and said her daughter had a temperature of 103. They had no insurance and she didn’t have the full amount for a doctor’s visit. She wanted to know if she could have her daughter treated, pay half and pay the rest later. There was desperation in her voice. The cashier took her hands off the keyboard in front of her, put them on her lap and said no, they couldn’t do that. The woman with the little girl stood there for a moment and then hurried out again. What kills me about this is I had my checkbook in my back pocket and money in the bank and I sat there and did nothing. When I told Mr. J about it later at home he asked me why I hadn’t gone after her and offered to pay, that the woman probably would have paid me back. I had no answer then and none now. But that mother’s shaky voice has haunted me all these years.

And here we are again, in the same situation, on a larger scale. There is money for the war. There is money for tax cuts. There is money for a bridge to nowhere. But there is no money for the woman with the sick child. There were some valid concerns about the CHIP bill. However, most of them were dealt with in the negotiation process. The Wall Street Journal published a story on this last week (“Why CHIP is bogged down,” by Sarah Lueck, 9/27). Let me note the relevant excerpt again here in case it got lost in the larger post:

In some ways, after difficult negotiations, the bill turned out to be an unusual example of cooperation. In talks with two Senate Republicans, House Democrats compromised. They cut new spending from $50 billion to $35 billion, gave up an effort to cover legal immigrants and young adults, and dropped cuts to private health insurers operating in Medicare.

The final deal includes many nods to Republicans – though most Republicans in the House and Senate oppose it as an irresponsible expansion of government spending. It reduces federal funding for states that enroll children from families with incomes above about $60,000 a year for a family of four; it bars the federal government from allowing any more states to use CHIP funds to cover parents; and it phases out coverage of childless adults that some states include in CHIP.

To tilt the program toward poorer children, the bill calls for states not meeting enrollment benchmarks for the lowest income children by October 2010 to give up CHIP funds for enrollees above 300% of the poverty level.

And so we sit in the clinic waiting room with our checkbook in our back pocket and spend our money on other things, and I wonder if we as a nation will still be remembering this moment and regretting it 20 years down the line.