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Appearing live on the satellite feed from Washington, DC, were Sens. (l to r) Rockefeller, Baucus, Hatch and Smith. The conversation was moderated by Susan Dentzer, health correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

TOWN HALL MEETING DISCUSSES HEALTHCARE FUNDING FOR KIDS

Town Hall panelist David Carroll (l) answers a question from the audience while panelists (l to r) Terri Shaw, and Sharon and Kayah Love listen.

More than 150 people attended the National Town Hall Meeting on Children’s Health Coverage at Children’s Hospital on Thursday, Jan. 11. Children’s was one of 36 sites in the nation receiving the live closed circuit broadcast from Washington, DC.

The meeting was called to highlight the need to reauthorize the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). SCHIP was passed in 1997 and provided $40 billion over 10 years for health insurance for children of the working poor. In California, the SCHIP funds are administered through Healthy Families and MediCal.

Four senators, Max Baucus, (DMontana), Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah), Jay Rockefeller, (D-West Virginia), and Gordon Smith, (R-Oregon), spoke at the meeting and were unanimous in their support of SCHIP reauthorization. However, they disagreed on whether the program should be expanded to include more kids.

“We should not expand to other populations until we cover all SCHIP-eligible children,” Utah’s Sen. Hatch said. Nationally, about 6 million children who are eligible for SCHIP are not currently enrolled in it.

Sen. Rockefeller, who supports expansion of the program to include all kids, reminded his colleagues that today’s budget environment for reauthorization is different than it was in 1997 when SCHIP was created.

“Now we have Iraq, Afghanistan, and enormous tax cuts benefiting people who don’t need benefits… [making it] much more difficult to do healthcare, and much easier to say we can’t afford to do it… We are constrained by a broader picture, higher deficits and debts…” Sen. Rockefeller explained.

Sen. Baucus, who chairs the Senate committee on finance, said he’d convene hearings on reauthorization in his committee in a few weeks. “We’ll go as far as we can go, within budget constraints,” he said.

Following the national broadcast, Children’s held its own town hall meeting to review SCHIP’s status locally.

Sharon Love talked about her daughter Kayah, who was born with tumors and spent the first year of her life in Children’s Neonatal Intensive Care Nursery being treated for them.

“This [health coverage] is really important, because in our case (Kayah) wouldn’t be here… there wouldn’t be a story… without the medical insurance,” Sharon said.

Terri Shaw from the California Health Program reported that 7.3 percent of California’s kids still aren’t covered by insurance. That amounts to about 764,000 kids, 450,000 of whom are eligible for SCHIP. “We’re very close to finishing the job in California,” she said. She suggested better outreach and less burdensome application procedures were needed, though in some cases, by federal statute, the process is becoming more difficult.

As more kids get enrolled, the system will require more dollars, said David Carroll, research director for the California Budget Project.

“We estimate that just to keep the current program going in California, we will have a shortfall of $2 to 3 billion in federal funds. Just reauthorizing SCHIP as is isn’t near good enough,” he said. “Funding should be the prime focus of SCHIP reauthorization.”

In the 10 years since SCHIP was created, there hasn’t been an adjustment for inflation, said Vipul Mankad, MD, Children’s chief medical officer, who moderated the local panel.

As the meeting drew to a close, Mary Dean, Children’s senior vice president, external affairs, urged everyone to write letters, send emails and make phone calls to their congressional representatives in support of SCHIP.

“A million kids in California alone are counting on us to speak up,” Mary said.

“In a world of short attention spans, we must keep the attention on these issues,” concluded Frank Tiedemann, Children’s president and CEO. “It is our job as leaders and advocates for kids to keep the nation’s attention on their needs… This is just the beginning.”