Besides seniors, there’s another group nearly everyone agrees should have health insurance: kids.
But two venues through which millions of low-income children get government-subsidized coverage are on the line, raising questions of how many kids could lose their insurance sometime this year.
They include the Children’s Health Insurance Program — a state-run program that’s losing most of its federal funding in October unless Congress extends it — and the Affordable Care Act’s insurance subsidies that low- and middle-income families use to buy private plans.
While the subsidies are highly controversial, CHIP has generated the least dissension of the two but still carries some partisan sticking points.
Both Republicans and Democrats, who have traditionally supported CHIP, have released draft plans to extend it. Republicans don’t want to do away with the program, but their proposal could result in some states scaling back their CHIP offerings, which has upset some Democrats.
When it comes to the insurance subsidies, the parties are much more divided. Republicans are eager for the Supreme Court to block the healthcare law’s subsidies in the 37 states using healthcare.gov instead of running their own exchanges, a decision expected to come down in June.
The impact on children will vary depending on how each issue plays out this year. On Tuesday the liberal-leaning Urban Institute released estimates of how many kids would lose coverage under several different scenarios.
As things stand right now, 2.9 million children are uninsured, about half as many lacking insurance before the Affordable Care Act. But if the court blocks the subsidies in states using federally run exchanges, the uninsured rate among kids would rise to 3.6 million. And if CHIP isn’t extended, the number would rise still higher, to 6.2 million children, according to the projections.
That could result in fewer kids having insurance than had it before the Affordable Care Act was passed, according to Urban Institute’s estimates.
“The ACA under current law is expected to reduce the number of uninsured children by roughly half,” the report says. “However, these gains could be eroded or even reversed without the continued availability of premium tax credits and the maintenance of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for children in all states.”
