State Children's Health Insurance Program
The policy that makes health care available to all
On January 29th, 2009, the State Children's Health Insurance Program passed the Senate sixty six to thirty two after previously passing the House on January 14th. The bill - H.R. 2 - first came about in 1997 and covers an estimated twenty nine million children. There is an estimated nine million that are still uninsured and legislators have been attempting to reform the law since 2007, but all attempts were vetoed by the former President George W. Bush. The bill is designed to cover children whose families cannot afford health care themselves, and now covers dental and mental health, as well as pregnant women.
SCHIP and Spending
The SCHIP bill will increase spending by about $32.2 billion between 2009 and 2013 - which is the year the bill is authorized until. The expansion money will come from a cigarette tax - a move that will raise the price of cigarettes thirty nine cents to one dollar.
How SCHIP is set up
It varies from state to state how the SCHIP program will run and it is left to each to decide, but they will be given additional federal funds for SCHIP. For the reason that SCHIP is a state and federal government partnership, states can decide if they would like to run the programs in conjunction with Medicaid, or by themselves as their own separate health program.
The Downfalls of H.R.2
According to an article posted to the Libertarian website "Cato Institute", the cigarette tax could cause crime to go up. The article quotes an economist named Patrick Fleener, "Today, 200 cases of cigarettes in a modest-sized transport truck would have a retail value in New York City of around $1 million and would be [a] tempting target for thieves." (3)
Jonathon Gruber and Sendhil Mullainathan, of MIT and Harvard University, respectively, on the other hand, assert that the cigarette tax is actually a good thing when it comes to smokers "as they provide a valuable self-control device." (4)
So is it bad to raise the cigarette tax or is it not? Considering the benefits for children throughout America, the answer is something that, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If raising a tax helps smokers practice self restraint as well as making sure children are taken care of medically, then it is leaning towards a good thing. Thieves robbing cigarette transport trucks and the black market rising in sales isn't a thought to be cherished, but perhaps one day one of the children who are alive because of SCHIP might be the one to take down crime in all it's forms.
Sources:
1. Health Care for America Now
2. Congressional Budget Office
4. Social Science Research Network
Child Receiving Healthcare
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