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2-13-08, 10:07 am
A bipartisan coalition of health care providers and policy advocates sharply criticized the massive cuts to health care programs for children in President Bush's budget proposal delivered to Congress last week.
According to the National Association of Children's Hospitals and First Focus, a bipartisan organization that advocates for children and their families in federal policy and budget decisions, Bush's 2009 budget slashes or eliminates a number of federal health programs vital to the health care of all children.
In addition to deep cuts in Medicaid, the nation's single largest payer of children's health care for working families, Bush's budget also cuts funding for important programs like poison control hotlines and funding for training children's doctors, said a press statement released by the two organizations.
"This is a tragedy, because 2009 marks yet another year where the president has failed to make children a priority in his federal budget," said First Focus President Bruce Lesley.
"The nation desperately needs to invest in the health of children – our most precious national resource," said Lesley. "This budget simply doesn't cut it."
Among the health care programs targeted by Bush is the federally funded Medicaid program. Bush's proposed cuts in that program are driven by new roadblocks for children to access it for health care coverage, as well for as the providers that serve them. Bush plans to use new eligibility requirements to strip $18.2 billion from Medicaid, which pays for the care of more than 29 million children.
Bush's budget cuts to Medicaid come with 11 new Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) policy changes released last year designed to eliminate children from the S-CHIP rolls. Like the Medicaid program, Bush's aim is to use the elimination of coverage for needy children to cut funding for S-CHIP.
Calling on Congress to block Bush's new rules limiting eligibility for Medicaid and S-CHIP, Lawrence McAndrews, president and CEO of the National Association of Children's Hospitals, said "The bottom line is – such enormous cuts would represent a frontal assault on health care programs that benefit children."
He added, "Sadly, it's not clear to us that the administration even understands the affect its combined cuts would have on children's health, much less children's readiness to learn and grow up to become productive members of society."
While Bush's budget includes an increase of $19.7 billion over five years for SCHIP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states need an increase of approximately $21.5 billion over the next five years simply to maintain their current programs. In essence Bush plans to underfund S-CHIP by almost $2 billion, forcing states to eliminate coverage for children.
"Don't be fooled by the President's proposed SCHIP increase," said Lesley. "It comes at the expense of Medicaid and limits eligibility in SCHIP."
Bush's budget also would kill the Children's Hospitals Graduate Medical Education program that currently assists children's hospitals to train more than one-third of all pediatricians, half of all pediatric subspecialists, and the majority of all pediatric research scientists devoted to biomedical advancements in children's health care.
His budget would eliminate the Emergency Medical Services for Children program that funds emergency services to assure their capacity to provide a high standard of pediatric emergency medical care.
Bush even proposes to cut Poison Control Centers by 37 percent (or $10 million) jeopardizing the state and regional poison control hotlines that parents rely on to save the lives of their children, who account for more than 60 percent of all calls to these centers.
Bush would also freeze funding for the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that serves 27.5 million children at $43 million less than its 2000 funding level.
Lesley told the press, "This is unquestionably a threat to the long-term health and future productivity of the nation, the exact opposite of the kind of investment-oriented budget the nation needs."
According to First Focus and the National Association of Children's Hospitals, particularly troubling is the proposal to eliminate the law protecting children with special health care needs from being enrolled in managed care without regard to public oversight and federal assurance they would have access to the providers they need.
--Reach Joel Wendland at
jwendland@politicalaffairs.net
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