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| Children’s Health Insurance |
 Judith Solomon, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, used to run the outreach program for Connecticut's S-CHIP program. She tells that you couldn't get that enrollment rate up to 95 percent even if you knocked on each door in the state seeking for eligible kids. There are language barriers — people who just don't want public assistance — and it's a population that's always in flux.
"Children are born, children age out, they reach age 19 and are no longer eligible," Solomon claims. "Family income increases, family income decreases; it's a very dynamic situation."
Avoiding 'Crowd-Out'
The Bush administration is also worried that families who can afford private health insurance will switch to S-CHIP if it's available because it's not very expensive. Administration official Dennis Smith says that's a concept known as crowd-out, and it undermines what S-CHIP was organized to do.
"The aim is to increase insurance coverage," Smith says. "But in crowd out, you're not increasing it, you're simply substituting one kind of coverage for another."
To help prevent that crowd-out, the administration will now require families who previously had private insurance to go without coverage for a year before becoming eligible for S-CHIP.
States would also have to show that the number of children in the state who are covered by private insurance isn't decreasing.
But New Jersey's Ann Kohler calls that part of the new rules particularly unfair.
"I cannot imagine any state being able to comply with that," she says. "There are plenty of reasons why people lose their private insurance, but it's not because of the S-CHIP program. People are not dropping their private insurance to get onto the S-CHIP program."
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