Experts discuss SCHIP

The U.S. House voted Tuesday to extend and expand the 10-year-old State Children's Health Insurance Program, called SCHIP. The Senate was expected to follow suit this week.

President George W. Bush has threatened to veto the legislation, warning that it's too expensive and will push children from private insurance to public health coverage.

Eric Wright is a professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis and director of the Center for Health Policy. He said SCHIP has been responsible for a "dramatic decline" in the number of uninsured children.

Failure to extend the program could result in an increase in the uninsured population and have a "deleterious effect on the overall health status of children in Indiana," he said. Wright added:

• Expanding coverage to more children could produce "crowd-out," in which people drop private insurance coverage for SCHIP coverage. But rising health-care costs are already pushing people out of private plans. In Indiana, workers with employer-based health care coverage have declined by 8 percent since 2000.
• Failure to extend SCHIP would undermine Gov. Mitch Daniels' Healthier Indiana program, which uses federal money along with a 44-cent increase in the state cigarette tax to expand coverage and pay for childhood immunizations and other health programs.

Nicole C. Quon is an assistant professor in the IU Bloomington School of Public and Environmental Affairs and an expert in health policy and politics. She said most people agree that children are vulnerable and should be protected, and most agree that too many children are uninsured. There is political support for resolving this issue. However, the debate underscores fundamental differences in values about health care: