The Republican Created Health Crisis for 10 Million Children

GOP Senator Orrin Hatch

Recently GOP Senator Orrin Hatch ranted when Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown suggested that Hatch and GOP policies were harming millions of regular Americans.  Hatch basically lied and said that he had worked to benefit poor Americans throughout his career. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are working to take from the poor and middle class and lavish tax cuts on the extremely wealthy and large corporations. A case in point is Republican refusal to renew funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a program that benefits poor children otherwise lacking health coverage.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest Republican travesty.  Here are excerpts:

Fifty-six days after Congress failed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), some American children are at risk of losing their health insurance. The deadline to renew the program’s funding was Sept. 30, and Congress hasn’t granted the program $15 billion to continue.

As a result, the popular state-level insurance program for low-income children and pregnant women is facing a funding cliff. While some states may be able to keep the program going through some of next year, half a dozen are projected to run out of funding by late December or early January.

States closest to the funding cliff are preparing to warn customers that funding might disappear, leaving kids in the lurch. There are a few options for those families who rely on CHIP once the funding disappears.

States decide if those families could be enrolled in Medicaid or covered through Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace offerings. But Republicans — Trump in the executive and members of his party in Congress and at the state level — have tried hard block access to both of those alternatives, by sabotaging Obamacare, eliminating support for enrollment, blocking Medicaid expansion, etc.

The program has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, but Republicans, in control of both chambers of Congress and steering a massive tax bill through a lightning-fast approval process, are now unable to the program the funds it needs to survive.

At the center of both House and Senate Republicans’ tax bills is a giant, unnecessary tax cut for corporations: a 20 percent corporate tax cut at a price tag of nearly $1.5 trillion dollars. The Senate has decided one way its bill will raise enough money to fund this is by repealing the ACA’s individual mandate provision, a move that would leave nearly 13 million Americans uninsured.

Trump’s tax proposal would sharply reduce the federal government’s ability to match state funds (the ACA expanded matching) and would cut billions from CHIP’s funding.

During a heated exchange with Sen. Sherrod Brown over the facts of the GOP tax plan, Brown highlighted that it doesn’t include any funding for CHIP, and any tax plan that truly wasn’t geared towards wealthy individuals would include that funding. Hatch replied sharply, “I’m not starting with CHIP.” 

Increasingly, voting Republican is to me a sign of one's moral bankruptcy.  Children don't matter, impoverished elderly do not matter.  No one matters except the wealthy and right wing Christian extremists.