hospital impact

by Nick Jacobs

According to an article by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post this week, Dennis G. Smith, director of the administration's Center for Medicaid and State Operations announced standards intended to restrict families from purchasing health coverage if the parents’ employers choose not to supply it. It will also block states from providing health care coverage to uninsured children from families with yearly incomes in the order of $50,000.

According to Meyerson, this new pronouncement was in direct response to governors like California’s Schwarzenegger and others who have chosen to provide health coverage to children from families earning two to three times more than the federal poverty level or $20,650 for a family of four.

He goes on to say that it appears that this administration fears that parents in the selected income groups will abstain from enrolling their children in private plans. As we have stated so many times before in these blogs, nearly 9 million American children are without health insurance coverage, and this number is fast approaching nearly 400,000 more uninsured children than last year.

Smith told the New York Times that the states must institute a minimum of a one-year period of no insurance for individuals before children become eligible, and they must also show that the number of children insured by private employers has not dropped over a five year period by more than two percent.

According to Meyerson, if a state wants to provide coverage for a chronically ill 2-year old whose parents’ have lost their health coverage, the state has to wait until she’s a chronically ill 3-year old. The somewhat passionate opinion of Mr. Meyerson is that the administration’s fervor on this position is to ensure that we cannot permit our children to obtain health coverage that may diminish the market share of big insurance. Opinions please?