Dive Brief:
- When Congress passed a 2-year extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) last April instead of a 4-year extension, advocacy groups, such as the First Focus Campaign for Children, began planning for 2017.
- In Washington, it's almost a given that CHIP won't be around for much longer, according to The National Journal. Republicans have expressed their ambivalence about the program since its inception, and now Democrats are also openly talking about getting rid of it now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is taking root.
- Those who are currently implementing the program are now considering alternatives if the program, which currently covers 8 million children, were to just disappear.
Dive Insight:
The obvious solution to a world without CHIP would be to move the children to coverage under the ACA exchanges. But those plans don't measure up to CHIP when it comes to cost-sharing, benefits or networks.
Although advocacacy programs such as First Focus would prefer to keep CHIP, since that isn't likely to happen, the next best thing would be legilation to ensure there's no dropoff in coverage. "Even in the children's community, people aren't necessarily focused on it," Bruce Lesley, a former Democratic Hill staffer who is now president of First Focus, told National Journal. "We don't want one of these fait accomplis where March 2017 comes around and we have President Cruz or Clinton or Bush or Trump or whoever.... Somebody's got to have, 'Here are your two or three options.' You either keep CHIP or you have this package of ACA fixes, or I don't even know what the other option is."
Since the adcocacy groups don't yet have a clear idea of what the legislative fix should look like, everything is still up for discussion, including new requirements for what should be covered under ACA plans, decreased cost-sharing for ACA plans covering kids, and offering CHIP as a separate plan on the ACA marketplaces. What they do agree on is that they need to create some kind of model legislation to frame the upcoming debate.