States should be allowed to cover young childless adults through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) if they extend their Medicaid programs to cover low-to-moderate-income children, a leading expert on SCHIP argues in a paper released Aug. 13 on the Health Affairs web site.
“Despite objections by the Bush administration and some members of Congress, it is uninsured adults, not children, who experience the most serious coverage deficits where federal financing options are concerned,” writes Sara Rosenbaum, the Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. More than 10 million young adults ages 19-26 were uninsured in 2006, “an astonishing” uninsurance rate of 33.2 percent.
In her paper, the third in a Health Affairs series on SCHIP, Rosenbaum points out that the SCHIP reauthorization debate provides the opportunity to reassess the program in light of developments in Medicaid policy and trends in coverage rates for different groups within the population. Read the abstract.
