Nine Million American Children Need Us

By Tim Canova — Candidate for Florida’s 23rd Congressional District

As Republicans scrambled to make one last-ditch attempt to repeal Obamacare, they also let a vital safety net for children fall through the cracks — compromising the health care for 9 million of our most vulnerable low-income children.

Congress just let the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) expire — a program that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1997 that provides health care for children from poor families and for low-income pregnant mothers.

Since its inception, CHIP has helped lower the percentage of children who were uninsured from nearly 14% when it was started to an all-time low of 4.5% in 2015.

Now these children are in serious jeopardy and the clock is ticking on them!

According to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), a group that advises Congress on Medicaid and CHIP policy, 10 states including the District of Columbia will run out of money by December and another 21 states by March of 2018. This will lead to dire consequences, forcing enrollment caps and freezes or even shutting down the programs altogether.

According to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 92% of Americans said the CHIP program was “extremely important,” and 76% said that Congress needed to reauthorize CHIP funding before it ran out.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have introduced a bipartisan bill, the “Keeping the Kids Insured Dependable and Secure (KIDS) Act” (S. 1827), to extend the CHIP program for 5 years. We support this bill, which would have passed had the GOP Senate leadership brought it to a vote. We demand the Senate vote on this bill to protect the health and welfare of millions of American children.

No child in America should lack access to health care. No person of any age should lack access to health care in our country. It’s unconscionable that nearly 30 million Americans are still without health insurance, and millions more are woefully underinsured.

The only fiscally sustainable solution going forward is single-payer, universal coverage — Medicare For All!

As the GOP shifts its attention to the budget and attempts to give obscene tax cuts to the already super rich, we need to hold them accountable for their mean-spirited neglect of our country’s poorest children.

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