Shawn Vestal: Expiration of kids’ insurance program sets new low-water mark for D.C. dysfunction

Not long ago, the Seattle Times editorial board asked members of Congress what they were going to do about violence and guns.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers answered that she was on it: She’s been “sharing meals with Democrats to help society come together,” as the Times put it.

While this is a terrific strategy, one wonders when we’ll see the concrete results from all the bread-breaking. We’ll want to carefully track how many Democrats will have to be eaten with for the school shootings to taper off.

Meanwhile, perhaps she and her meal companions could take up another issue threatening the health of thousands of her youngest constituents: The expiration of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

CHIP – which insures 9 million kids across the country – has expired while Trump fiddles the GOP into knots. It would take exactly zero meals with Democrats for McMorris Rodgers and the majority party to renew CHIP and eliminate the uncertainty among state officials, local health officials and the 9 million kids themselves, but it somehow remains unrenewed.

The House and Senate have been wrangling over finding a fix for this – but the fix has been held hostage by the majority’s obsession with undercutting Obamacare and easing the tax burden on the country’s wealthiest people. There’s also the difficulty of the help-one-hurt-one philosophy that seems ascendant in Congress at the moment: If someone is helped over here, an equivalent or greater number of people need to be hurt over there.

It’s just balance.

So it’s been kind of funny – not funny ha-ha, but funny devious – that the majority party keeps blaming the minority party for holding things up. They probably just need to eat together more.

Short of that, the clock ticks on the millions of living, breathing children who depend on the CHIP program – kids who are being used as human shields in political war. The bar is being raised daily on what qualifies as a “disgrace” in Washington, D.C., but this one clears it handily.

The program expired at the end of September, while Congress engaged in another effort to undo Obamacare. Most people expect some agreement on renewal eventually, but lawmakers could not be bothered to do it on time, so state officials are left trying to figure out whether to start yanking coverage, finding other ways to cover possible shortfalls, or just holding their breath.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated at what point states would exhaust their CHIP funding without some replacement. For Washington, that deadline falls somewhere between January and March.

It’s sooner in Idaho, where officials say they are strategizing for how they might pick up the slack if the federal government doesn’t come through. Niki Forbing-Orr, spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Health, said state law requires Idaho to provide coverage for that population – so whatever kinds of hoops they have to jump through, coverage for kids there will continue.

“We expect our funding to last at least through January, so we’re hopeful Congress will find a way to restore funding by then,” she said.

Officials with Washington’s Health Care Authority didn’t return messages this week seeking comment on their contingency plans.

CHIP insures children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford insurance on their own. Roughly 9 of every 10 children covered live in families at less than twice the poverty level ($49,200 for a family of four). It also covers about 370,000 pregnant women a year.

In health-care terms, CHIP is a success: the rate of uninsured children in America has plummeted from 14 percent in 1997 to 5 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a much more dramatic improvement than the rate among adults, which dropped from 19 percent to 14 percent in the same time (though the adult rate also reached 22 percent in 2012).

It is distributed to states, which have flexibility – state flexibility! the holy grail! – to design their own approaches. And so a state like, say, Washington has been able to build a program that expands coverage beyond federal guidelines, and covers even more children.

CHIP funding in Washington is folded into the APPLE Health program for kids. Our rate of uninsured kids is 2.5 percent – about half that of Idaho.

The idea that CHIP has become caught up in the legislative grotesqueries of D.C., that it has become a bargaining chip for budget cuts, is a sign of the depth of our political dysfunction. It’s also business as usual. Just another Friday. Ho-hum. The battle lines in the attempts to eradicate Obamacare, after all, basically came down to an intractable debate among a one-party congressional majority over whether to make things quite a bit worse for people or a whole lot worse for people.

They couldn’t decide.

So the game of chicken over CHIP is no surprise. There’s no telling how many meals with Democrats it will take to put an end to it.