Imagine if tomorrow you received a letter that said your child’s health insurance was ending. What if you learned that the coverage you had come to depend on for your child’s asthma medication, tooth ache or recent soccer injury was just no longer available. What would you do? How would you suddenly adjust to the new expenses and disruptions?
Unfortunately, this could soon be a reality for thousands of low-income Utah families. Federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, has expired. If Congress doesn’t act soon to renew CHIP funding, Utah’s CHIP program will be forced to make painful choices. These could include shutting down the program until funding is restored and sending closure notices to thousands of Utah families as early as November. This problem is not unique to Utah. States across the country will also be running out of funding and left with the same hard decisions.
CHIP covers over 19,000 children in Utah and nearly 9 million across the U.S. In recent years, Utah has made historic gains in reducing the rate of children without health insurance. CHIP and Medicaid together cover almost 215,000 Utah kids. Without these critical health insurance programs, Utah children would not be able to access the affordable care they need to thrive.
Yet this past year we have seen our leaders repeatedly ignore the needs of children. Instead, they have taken actions that put children’s health care at greater risk and threaten to reverse the progress we have made for kids, from proposing harmful cuts to Medicaid to the current obstacles for CHIP funding.
Federal funding for other vital programs for families has also expired, including community health centers. This could have dire consequences for health centers, which provide affordable health care to the uninsured and working poor across the state. In many rural areas, a community health center may be a family’s only source of care.
Congress is speeding dangerously toward a scenario that would devastate our health care safety net for families and children.
By failing to act on CHIP, Congress is also putting children’s academic success at risk. When children do not have access to health care, they are more likely to get sick and miss school. Children with untreated medical conditions or illnesses have a harder time focusing in the classroom and can fall behind. Healthy kids are better learners and can achieve greater academic success.
Congress currently has a bipartisan solution for CHIP, spearheaded by our own Sen. Orrin Hatch. Sen. Hatch is one of the grandfathers of the CHIP program and continues to be a strong champion today. But we need more members of Congress to get this bipartisan agreement to the finish line, without letting offsets or amendments derail kids’ coverage.
The question now is, can Congress do it in time? Before Utah runs out of funding for the program, before the lives of thousands of Utah families are upset and children’s health is at risk?
We cannot delay on protecting children’s health and ability to succeed. Utah families deserve to know that their children have stable coverage. Our leaders must renew their bipartisan commitment to CHIP now. Utah kids and families can’t afford to wait.
Earl R. Arnoldson is principal of Indian Hills Elementary School. Kenneth Limb is principal of Mountain View Elementary School. Jessie Mandle is senior health policy analyst at Voices for Utah Children.