Eliot, Arnold Appeal To Bush On Child Insurance Issue
BY JOHN TOSCANO

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in proposing new rules that would deny health care to children and pregnant women, "will set Medicaid and state programs back 40 years", Governor Eliot Spitzer warned in a letter to President George W. Bush, in which he was joined by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in proposing new rules that would deny health care to children and pregnant women, "will set Medicaid and state programs back 40 years", Governor Eliot Spitzer warned in a letter to President George W. Bush, in which he was joined by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The CMS rules, the governors maintained, "are being promulgated without proper review, impose eligibility standards that would both deny health care to vulnerable children and pregnant women and greatly restrict the flexibility of states to reach your administration's stated goals of efficiently providing coverage, said Spitzer, a Democrat, and Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

"The rules must be withdrawn," they told the president.

This was the latest move by Spitzer to reverse the CMS rules which, he said, contradict existing laws. California and New York currently cover more than 1.4 million children and pregnant women through the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, the two state officials said. This represents nearly 25 percent of all SCHIP enrollees in the United States.

On August 17, CMS, which administers SCHIP set new rules governing the program. Among them were the requirement that until a state enrolls 95 percent of those eligible for SCHIP in households making under 200 percent of the poverty line ($41,300 for a family of four) they cannot provide coverage to children in families making above 250 percent of the poverty line ($51,625 for a family of four).

In their letter to the president, the two governors called on CMS to reverse its edict in order to allow states which include areas where the cost of living is higher, like New York and California, to have the flexibility to cover more children.

They also asked CMS to change other troublesome new rules, including the requirement that children eligible for SCHIP must go without coverage during a year-long waiting period after enrolling, and that states expanding SCHIP must demonstrate a less than two percent decline in employer-sponsored insurance.

The CMS rules jeopardize Spitzer's plan, passed this year, to increase eligibility to 400 percent of the poverty line and thereby offer universal coverage to New York's children. While every state aspires to cover every eligible child possible no state has yet reached the 95 percent threshold. In New York, 88 percent of such children are enrolled.

"Ensuring that all children in this country have access to quality health care is a foremost national priority and an issue that rises above party lines," said Spitzer. "States are showing great leadership on this issue and New York was proud to achieve a bipartisan agreement this year to provide health care to the state's 400,000 uninsured children."

Spitzer said he and Schwarzenegger were calling on Bush "to do the right thing and roll back these troubling federal roadblocks".