6 The Hampton Roads Messenger


Volume 9 Number 3


Will Congress Save Health Insurance Program for Low-Income Kids?


the budget debates in Washington. And those state budget debates are happening right now ... So it's important that Congress send a


message federal funding.


At this point, does it look like Congress will that?


do CHIP incredibly BY ANNA CHALLET Ed. Note: Unless Congress acts,


federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which matches state dollars to provide health coverage for children under 19 in low-income families, will end next year. Ed Walz is vice president of First Focus, a DC-based advocacy organization for children and families that focuses on federal policymaking. He spoke with NAM Reporter Anna Challet about the future of CHIP and the likelihood of Congress stepping in to preserve the program.


Who does CHIP provide health


coverage for? CHIP provides coverage for 8


million children or so throughout


the course of the year who would otherwise be uninsured because their parents work and make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford the high cost of private insurance ... Before CHIP, the uninsured rate among kids was about 15 percent. Today it's about 7 percent. It's essentially cut the uninsured rate among children in half.


With the Affordable Care Act


now fully implemented, why is CHIP still necessary?


Kids who are covered by CHIP today would not all be able to get coverage through the ACA if CHIP were to go away … If it did go away, some of the kids would move into Medicaid, but it's a relatively small number, in part because not every state has expanded Medicaid,


but


also because CHIP covers kids well in excess of the Medicaid expansion level. The ACA now requires that Medicaid expand to 138 percent of the federal poverty level in states that choose that option, but ... CHIP covers kids much higher up the income scale. For example, in my home state of Wisconsin, it's 250 percent of the federal poverty level.


If CHIP were to go away, the ACA


wouldn't pick [some] kids up because of what's called the family glitch, or the children's glitch. That has to do with a problem in the way the IRS implemented the tax subsidies for the


exchanges [the state health insurance marketplaces created by the ACA]. Essentially it means that as many as 2 million kids who would otherwise qualify for exchange coverage won't get the subsidies they need to make it affordable, so they won't get insurance. Even in a post-ACA world, there's not a coverage solution for all the kids who are currently in CHIP.


The other problem is that if kids


do get exchange coverage, research shows that it won't be as valuable or as good as the coverage they currently get through CHIP ... At a national level, CHIP provides more than 80 percent of the child-specific care that kids need, while average exchange plans provide a little over half of that child-specific care. And at the same time, CHIP plans average less than $100 in out-of-pocket annual costs, whereas the average exchange plan would cost nearly $1000, so ten times the cost for less care.


What is the threat to CHIP right now? Essentially requirements there are two for a government


program to function. One, Congress has to authorize it, and give the agencies permission to run it. [Also] they have to fund it. There's no requirement that they do those two things on the same schedule. So one of the weird things about where we are right now in the public policy around CHIP is that the federal government has the authority under law to run CHIP through 2019, but funding for CHIP runs out at the end of federal fiscal year 2015, which is the fiscal year we just started. So a year from now, in October 2015, funding for CHIP will end. That's the real threat. The threat is that even though there might be authorization, there won't be money, and that is the effective end of CHIP.


The challenge right now is when Congress will extend that funding. And it's important act


that Congress this year, because even though


federal funding won't technically end for another 11 months, the reality is that because CHIP is a federal-state partnership, the budget decisions that happen in the state capitals all over the country matter just as much as


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is popular,


and it has a strong track record of bipartisanship.


So


we're hopeful and have reason to believe, based on our conversations with


policymakers


folks on Capitol understand


Hill, that that CHIP Rocket Women FROM PAGE 2


frontier for women but they have actually been quietly exploring it for awhile now. They may not always make the news because they are behind the scenes unlike Indian-Americans Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams who actually went to space. But they are part of the DNA of India’s space programme.


The BBC profiled Minal Sampath, a


systems programme.


engineer She


with talks about


the Mars the


18-hour days in windowless rooms, of the guilt of checking payloads while her young son is sick. But she also jokes that she sometimes forgot she is a woman. “Maybe it's because we spend a lot of time working in clean rooms with full suits on, so you can't tell who is male or female," she laughs.


This does not mean sciences are some kind of thriving petri dish for women in India. When India Today profiled India’s top 25 scientists it included only four women. Three-and-a-half, really, since one woman was part of a couple. A 2012 study by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and the National Institute of Science and Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) raised alarm bells when it revealed that of the total indexed projects, women scientists exclusively contributed only 3.4 percent of research. Even within that, certain fields like reproductive biology


drew far more publish


researchers than others fields. And when women did


women research


they published in “low impact factor and domestic journals and also are cited less as compared to their male counterparts.” The Women in Science panel of the Indian Academy of Sciences notes that while women are motivated to pursue a Ph.D degree their “post-PhD. remain disproportion- ately low.”


Kausik Datta points out on his blog that when Dr. Yamuna Krishnan won the government-awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 2013


this


year that states can continue to count on


CHIP to


November 2014


still plays an important role ... There's momentum


get CHIP funding


extended in the lame duck session this fall, so after the elections.


What will happen if they don't?


The honest answer and the scary answer is that we don't really know what will happen. It'll vary from state to state, but what we can say is that when we've seen a similar problem in the past, the outcome has not been good for children.


California is unfortunately the


poster child there. Back in 2009, when the CHIP agency in California ran into a state funding problem, they responded by establishing a waiting list. That meant that kids who were newly eligible for what was then called the Healthy Families program were not enrolled, and kids who were covered by Healthy Families but lost coverage for administrative reasons or for whatever reason then were not able to re-enroll ... Even a year after the waiting list was lifted, the agency had only been able to return enrollment levels to 50,000 kids lower than when they put the waiting list in place ... If you imagined similar reactions at the national level, it would literally put the health of millions of children at risk.


she was one of only 15 women who had won the award since its inception in 1958. That’s 15 out of 450 total awardees! Datta says embarrassedly that when challenged to name top 5 women scientists in India without doing a Google search he “couldn't remember off-hand the names of any top tier Indian women in the pure sciences fields.”


That probably holds true for most of us.


It’s not that the women of ISRO are complaining. Or see themselves as activists. They might even cringe at being called “women scientist” as if they are some kind of sub-species. N. Valarmathi, the head of the PSLV- C19-RISAT-1 Mission tells Deccan Herald her only message to women was “I would say all women are equally capable and they all have very good potential; it should be properly utilized.”


But there is always a glass ceiling to be broken. Sampath hints at that when she says “I want to be the first woman director of a space centre.”


Sampath’s dream of actually going to space might not be realized but this dream could come true. After all when she was growing up, few around her would have dreamed she would be helping launch a Mars orbiter. Asked how she decided she wanted to work on the space programme, she gave a very familiar answer.


"I was in [my last year at primary school], when I saw a live launch on TV. At that time it just struck me in my mind how good it would be to work there, and today I am here."


Perhaps another young woman seeing the photograph of women like Sampath on the front pages of newspapers today will be inspired to reach for the stars as well.


And that would be a benefit we could not have ever imagined would come out of Mangalyaan.


John Gray thinks men are from Mars and women are from Venus. He should have been at ISRO yesterday. It turns out Mars has more than its share of women too.


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