Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

AUSTIN, June 4 - Texas House Speaker Joe Straus wants to take an in-depth look at children’s health insurance before the next legislative session in 2011.

“That is one of the issues that will be addressed during the interim,” Straus said, at a breakfast meeting with members of the Capitol press corps on Tuesday. “I’ve already spoken to advocates for expanding the CHIP program. We are going to make every effort to make sure it receives the attention it deserves.”

A bill that would have provided health coverage to 80,000 uninsured Texas kids died on the last day of the legislative session. The idea was to allow families lacking affordable health care coverage an option to ‘buy in’ to the CHIP program. The measure had support of the Metro 8, the state’s eight largest chambers of commerce, the Texas Hospital Association and the Texas Medical Association.

The bill, authored by Sen. Kip Averitt, R-Waco, also won support from a majority of members in the Texas House and Senate but due to procedural difficulties did not make it to Governor Rick Perry’s desk for signature. Under the bill, families earning up to 300 percent, or three times the federal poverty level, could have bought into the CHIP program. This would have given a family of four earning up to $66,000 a better shot at securing health insurance. Currently, only families earning up to 200 percent of poverty can access CHIP.

Straus said early in the session that he had misgivings about expanding CHIP to cover those earning above 200 percent of the poverty level.

“I have been a supporter of the Children’s Defense Fund in the past,” Straus told reporters this week “I made some comments earlier in the session that I would prefer to see, before an expansion to three or four hundred percent of the poverty levels, that the existing CHIP program be taken advantage of in a more full manner but I am generally supportive of CHIP expansion.”

Straus said it was “unfortunate” that CHIP expansion was “one of those issues that was held hostage to those several days where we were stymied here.”

Straus was referring to a meltdown that took in place in the House when Democrats went on a ‘go slow’ on local bills in order to block Vote ID legislation. As a result, major bills like Averitt’s Senate Bill 841, did not make it to the House floor. Senate support for Averitt’s measure was 29-2.
Like Straus, Gov. Perry does not like the idea of expanding CHIP to families earning above $40,000.
“I don’t think that it’s a good public policy to be going to 300 percent eligibility,” Perry told reporters this week, at a news conference in which he reviewed the 81st legislative session.

“I think there are better ways to bring the poorest of our poor into the system and that’s what we need to be focusing on rather than taking a simple approach that basically says, ‘Well if you’ll just raise the eligibility level to 300 percent that will take care of it.’ I don’t think it would.”

Like Straus, Perry said more effort needs to be made to ensure poorer families are covered.

“I think you could, for instance, do a better job of going out and recruiting into the system those that are not getting insurance at this particular one time for whatever reason and those that are the poorest of the poor are (the ones) that we are interested in getting into it, not someone that is at 300 percent of poverty,” Perry said.

Luisa Saenz, Texas Rio Grande Valley director for the Children’s Defense Fund, said her group was “sorely disappointed” that the session ended without meeting the will of the vast majority of Texans - to see more children added to the CHIP rolls.

“The CHIP bill passed both chambers four times by wide margins. It is sad that in spite of its merits and the fact that it could bring significant federal funding, the CHIP bill did not pass because of unrelated battles,” Saenz told the Guardian.

“At the end of the day, leadership that had expressed concern about covering more children failed to step in and save the CHIP bill.”

Saenz said thousands of Valley families were not only hopeful of the CHIP expansion plan passing but also supportive of legislation from Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, that would have provided continuous eligibility for Children’s Medicaid from six to 12 months.

Saenz said Valley families would be particularly disappointed because they repeatedly heard about bipartisan interest in making sure the poorest children have access to health coverage and yet, when the session ended, there was nothing to show for it.

“As a result, about 20,000 of an estimated 65,000 uninsured Rio Grande Valley children will not have the opportunity to get CHIP coverage while more than 196,000 will not have 12-month Children's Medicaid coverage,” Saenz said.

Saenz noted that there is still a possibility of Gov. Perry calling a special session.

“There is still an opportunity to include a CHIP buy-in proposal to the agenda of the special session of the 2009 Legislature when Gov. Rick Perry calls a special session,” Saenz said. “Passing the CHIP bill and getting significant expansion of federal funding available to our state would be the right choice for Texas children and taxpayers.”

Saenz said Valley families would also be anxiously waiting to see if President Obama introduces universal health care coverage, a concept familiar in other industrialized countries in which everyone pays into but is free at the point of use.

The Children’s Defense Fund was one of 70 organizations within the Texas Finish Line Campaign that sought access to affordable, comprehensive health coverage for all Texas children this legislative session.

In a statement issued Thursday, the Texas Finish Line Campaign said: “Ultimately the bill was derailed not on its merits, but because time expired and the top legislative leadership—the lieutenant governor, speaker of the house, and governor—failed to intervene and ensure the bill’s passage.”

In failing to pass the CHIP expansion legislation, the Texas Finish Line Campaign said Texas loses access to millions of dollars in federal matching funds made available to states earlier this year through the federal SCHIP reauthorization.

“Without maximizing our state investment in CHIP, Texas taxpayers continue to surrender millions of Texas taxpayer income to other states,” the Campaign said.

“In addition to the state’s lost financial opportunity, privately insured taxpayers and local hospital districts continue to foot the bill of rising health care costs, insurance premiums, and local taxes that support hospital emergency rooms providing care for growing numbers of uninsured who lack access to cost-effective preventive care.”