October 31, 2007 - With President Bush threatening to veto a second bill expanding funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal study says twenty-one states will run out of money for children’s health insurance in the coming year. Nine of the twenty-one states are expected to exhaust their funds as soon as March, according to the Congressional Research Service. Those states include Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
By a vote of 265-142, the U.S. House passed a second SCHIP bill last week expanding the program by $35 billion over the next five years. SCHIP currently provides 6.6 million children with health insurance and additional funding would provide an additional four million children with health care. The new SCHIP legislation contains only minor changes from the version President Bush vetoed earlier this month.
“This legislation does what the President promised to do in 2004 - cover children who are eligible but not included in the program,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said in a statement. “This legislation gives him another opportunity to do right by America’s children. So I hope and expect he will sign this bill.”
With 9 million children in this country currently without health care, polls have found between 75 to 80 percent of the country support the vetoed bill. With the Senate set to move forward on modified SCHIP legislation, President Bush is threatening to veto the House bill.
Read Majority Leader Hoyer’s statement following Bush’s veto threat here.
Read more about the Congressional Research Service study here.
