Working Poor and Lower Middle Class Children Excluded

It's a hard road climbing from poverty to Middle Class America. Having my own experience making that climb and watching others along the way gave me a sense just how hard. If you have a family to take care of, more than likely you're fighting to get a job that offers insurance, while balancing one or more part time jobs that keep you off it, by keeping your hours just under full time status. All the while taking care of your children and paying your bills.

The White House today just made that task far more difficult:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

Jennifer at Young Philly Politics summarizes the situation here in Philadelphia: Hey Pennsylvania: How dare you try to give poor-but-not-the-very-poorest kids doctors!:

...The idea is that if a state wants to raise the eligibility bar to insure more children, they must first prove that they have enrolled 95% of the children in the state at below 200% of the line, practically speaking, a very difficult task....If unchallenged, this would mean that many children who are currently eligible for CHIP in Pennsylvania, which says that anyone at 300% of the poverty line is eligible, could be knocked off the books and back to being uninsured. Well, the president says that they'd be encouraged to re-enter the private market. But that takes money, and even 300% of our ridiculously low official poverty rate ($20,650 for a family of four!) doesn't give you all that much.