schip

Though it’s been little mentioned throughout the health reform debate, there’s a showdown brewing between House and Senate Democrats over the future of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, previously know as SCHIP.
House lawmakers have proposed to do away with the program at the end of 2013, transitioning millions of kids instead to private plans [...]

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who last month salvaged the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the Senate’s health reform bill, just issued a statement condemning the House legislation for proposing to terminate the program.
“As health reform moves forward, we need to make sure children can keep their CHIP coverage and not be forced into untested private [...]

Nine months ago, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill were all celebration as they hailed the renewal of the program. Last week, they called for its demise.

Not even nine months after President Obama, with much fanfare, signed into law a five year, $33 billion reauthorization of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, House Democrats have proposed to dismantle it.
Under the $894 billion health reform legislation that House leaders unveiled last week, CHIP would cease to exist at the end of 2013, [...]

A little after midnight, nearing the end of yesterday’s marathon health reform debate in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) had the stage, and the audience fell strangely silent. Rockefeller talked about his experiences as a VISTA volunteer in Appalachia decades ago; he talked about the destitution and absence of health care in [...]

With all eyes on the political battle brewing over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, it’s easy to forget that the tougher congressional fight this summer will almost certainly revolve around health care reform.
Lending a glimpse at what’s looming, The Washington Post today gives a few leaked details of what Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) is [...]

I admire former Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant’s ability to push a meme, but this is sort of ridiculous.
With the 100-day anniversary just one week away, it’s notable that almost all of Obama’s accomplishments so far have been rhetorical, rather than policy-based.
Let’s see … there was the passage of the stimulus bill, the passage [...]

Much is being said — some praise and some criticism — of the bipartisan outreach that’s marked the first weeks of the Obama administration. But you won’t convince Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) that’s it’s happening everywhere.
Grassley, the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said this week that his counterpart, Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), [...]

The tobacco industry is fighting a lonely battle against health insurance for poor kids.
A coalition of tobacco industry groups ran a full-page ad in the influential Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, on Monday warning President-elect Barack Obama that a proposed tobacco tax hike to cover the expansion of the popular State Child Health Insurance Program [...]

This is a little bit inside baseball, but it lends a glimpse at the relationship between politics and policy in Washington.
Democrats, as they push to renew and expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, hope to include coverage for legal immigrants, who currently must wait five years to receive health care under Medicaid [...]