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Governor Schwarzenegger Joins CMA in Fight to Continue Healthy Families Coverage for Uninsured Kids
With the White House threatening to veto CMA-supported legislation that would reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and proposing new SCHIP eligibility restrictions, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is fighting back. “As you rally governors to do more to help fix our broken health care system, your administration has repeatedly modified existing Medicaid and SCHIP rules, harming states’ capacity to help you achieve our shared objectives,” wrote Governor Schwarzenegger and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in a joint letter to President George Bush. SCHIP has provided health insurance to hundreds of thousands of California’s uninsured children for a decade. CMA has been urging Congress to reauthorize this very important program at current eligibility levels. (In California, families at or below 250 percent of federal poverty level are currently eligible for Healthy Families coverage.) Governor Schwarzenegger has previously proposed expanding Healthy Families coverage in California to individuals at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level, an idea that CMA wholeheartedly supports. With the SCHIP program set to expire on September 30, this will be a hot topic next month in Washington, D.C. A bill (HR 3162, the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act) passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month would reauthorize the Healthy Families program at current levels and stop the 15 percent Medicare physician pay cut. It would also update California’s geographic payment localities and prevent any geographic payment reductions for three years. The Senate, however, passed a scaled-down version of the House bill, without the Medicare provisions. Because of this discrepancy, the physician payment reforms are at risk of being scaled back. It is important for physicians to make their congressional representatives understand that stopping the 15 percent payment cuts planned over the next two years is critical to preserving access to care for Medicare patients. CMA urges physicians to contact their congressional representatives and ask them to protect access to care by reauthorizing SCHIP and stopping the Medicare physician payment cut. Call AMA’s grassroots hotline at 800/833-6354, enter your zip code when prompted, and you will be automatically connected with your representative. Click here for talking points. Below are copies of the letters that CMA recently sent to Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein on this issue. Contact: Elizabeth McNeil, 415/882-3376 or emcneil@cmanet.org.
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