11,000 Children in Virginia

The compromise bill provides an additional $35 billion in funding over the next 5 years paid for by an increase in the tobacco tax, equating to a $0.61 per pack.  This would boost the enrollment from 6.6 million to 10 million and dramatically reduce the ranks of the 9 million children currently without health insurance in this country.

To an extent, Thelma's heartless opposition is simply rubber-stamping Bush's belief that people without insurance could just get health care at an emergency room, ignoring the fact that insuring children is cost-effective in that providing them with preventive healthcare services makes them healthier and more successful in school and in life.  Drake also wants to ignore the more than 80% of uninsured African American children and 70% of Latino children, who as Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) points out in the video below the fold, are eligible for the program but are not enrolled. 

It is, however, more likely that what is at issue for Tra La La is the fact that the compromise bill also repeals a 2006 documentation requirement to prove citizenship (i.e., showing passports or birth certificates).  This particular requirement has also resulted in over 11,000 children in Virginia to be denied coverage, being bounced from the program, and has cost the state millions of $ to administer. 

Writes WaPo:  "In Virginia, for instance, during the first nine months of implementation, the state's Medicaid rolls fell by 11,000 children -- even as the number of children enrolled in SCHIP, the parallel program for children in families earning slightly more, continued to rise. The impact wasn't on Hispanic children, whose families tend to have documents available and whose enrollment numbers continued to increase, but on white and African American children."

"The House provision makes the documentation requirement optional for states, which, after all, have an interest in seeing that their Medicaid dollars are spent properly. Adults on Medicaid would still have to prove citizenship, swear that their children are citizens and provide their children's Social Security numbers. And states would have to conduct annual audits to ensure that no illegal immigrants are being covered."

"The Congressional Budget Office estimates that lifting the documentation requirement would raise costs $2 billion over 10 years. But, CBO Director Peter Orszag told me, that's almost entirely because it would increase enrollment of eligible children."

But no, Thelma Drake choses to ignore that fact in order to advance her xenophobic fear-mongering agenda by playing politics with children's health.  Drake and friends are "trying to make a bogeyman out of all sorts of 'brown folks' who are not supposed to be covered by SCHIP anyway if they come to this country illegally." (Firedoglake).  96% of America's children are legal residents in this country.  So, where's the scary bogeyman, Thelma? 

Painting SCHIP as an "illegal" immigrant bonanza is all part of a sick GOP plan to accuse Democrats of "doing everything but carrying illegals' luggage across the border", even if it does so at the cost of innocent children who are legal residents but whose low-income families can't afford health insurance.  Shame on you, Thelma.

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