COLLEGE PARK, Maryland — Funding for the Children’s Insurance Program, or CHIP, expired without federal reauthorization on Sept. 30. Since then, state legislators have been actively tweeting about the program, urging fellow legislators to take action.
If we don’t reauthorize CHIP soon, 65,000 Virginia kids could lose their health insurance. We can’t let that happen. https://t.co/EYFPa69FCW
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) October 20, 2017
Congressional GOP is so obsessed with their health care sabotage that they’ve abandoned 9 million kids in need of health care. Disgraceful. https://t.co/X8eKwdPqMz
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) October 19, 2017
Last night, I spoke on the Senate floor about funding for #CHIP and community health centers, which expired at the end of Sept. pic.twitter.com/6JAjbDCs2x
— Sen. Debbie Stabenow (@SenStabenow) October 19, 2017
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., posted an entire Twitter thread on Oct. 16.
CHIP currently provides health insurance for over 9M low-income children, including more than 142,300 kids in Maryland.
— Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) October 16, 2017
Maryland’s CHIP program, the Maryland Children’s Health Program (MCHP), has funding through March 2018 and had 142,585 enrollees as of June 2017, the Maryland Department of Health told Capital News Service.
The 2017 enrollment for MCHP is the highest it has been since 1998, when comparing current figures to historical data from Kaiser Family Foundation.
“If Congressional Republicans don’t reauthorize the program, they will start denying critical care to some of our country’s most vulnerable. It’s time to put partisan fights aside and get down to business — we cannot leave these children behind,” said Sen. Van Hollen, in a statement provided to Capital News Service.
Dr. Tina Cheng, director of the department of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital, says that 90 percent of the children that she attends to at the Harriet Lane Clinic are on Medicaid or CHIP.
“These are primarily families that live in Baltimore City neighborhoods and we have about 15,000 visits per year and follow about 8,500 kids,” Cheng said. “So if Medicaid or CHIP are not funded, I would expect that a proportion of those 8,500 kids that we see would not have insurance anymore.”
.@HopkinsMedicine‘s Dr. Tina Cheng urges Congress to #extendCHIP: https://t.co/GRLRjLiEfp
— Amer Acad Pediatrics (@AmerAcadPeds) September 28, 2017
Earlier this month, committees in both the House and Senate held markups on separate bills aimed at extending funding for CHIP. The bills still require final action.