child insurance

Child insurance program only proves costly

(cjonline.com) - The great American journalist H.L. Mencken tried to tell us, way back in 1920: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

That’s a pretty good characterization of the $115 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, commonly known as SCHIP, that President Obama signed earlier this month.

The problem the SCHIP program, originally enacted in 1997, purported to address was the poor quality of health care for children in low-income families. Its method is to enroll an increasing number of children in the SCHIP program, which is similar to Medicaid, the program for low-income families, with a couple of twists.

The SCHIP program is aimed at families with too much income to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford private health insurance. Unfortunately it embodies perverse incentives that make whatever good it does extraordinarily expensive, and it is likely not the most effective means of improving the health of poor children.

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