If you're not already, you need to read McClatchy's DC news reporting. It's the only place you'll find clear fact-checking like this analysis of the debate over the SCHIP bill that President Bush just vetoed:
President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program "would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year."
That's not true.
The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state's Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.
States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush's Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.
Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn't change it.
The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.
That's true.
Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that was inevitable to some degree when any government program expanded. The CBO estimates that the legislation would attract 5.8 million new enrollees by 2012. Of them, 3.8 million would be uninsured and eligible under current requirements, and 2 million probably would have had private coverage before the expansion.
That's a rate of about 1 in 3 new enrollees dropping private insurance. "We don't see very many other policy options that would reduce the number of uninsured children by the same amount without creating more" dropouts from private insurance, Orszag said.
For more on Bush's dissembling about S-CHIP, see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Ron Brownstein (via Mark Thoma).
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