YAKIMA, WA – Wednesday in Yakima, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), applauded Senate passage of legislation that will provide health care coverage for nearly 10 million children nationwide. By a vote of 68 to 31, the Senate passed the bipartisan Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) bill that reauthorizes $35 billion for the program which provides health insurance to children from low-income, working families. The funds will not only ensure coverage for the 6.6 million kids on CHIP today, it will expand coverage to another 3.3 million kids across the country, including nearly 35,000 in Washington state. However, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill. 

 

“Right here in the Yakima-Tri-Cities region there are almost 11,000 uninsured children. That’s almost 8% of the children who live in the area and almost double the state’s average. We need to prevent the number of uninsured children in this nation from growing,” said Cantwell. “I worked hard to get a fair, bipartisan bill out of the Finance Committee that could pass on the floor and the Senate passed it by a veto-proof margin. Now I hope the president will put aside political grandstanding sign it without delay, so that more than 10 million American children can have a better tomorrow.”

 

For years, Cantwell has worked to prevent states from being punished for their own efforts to expand coverage to more children prior to the enactment of CHIP, and her efforts have now paid off in the Senate Finance Committee’s bill now headed to the Senate floor.

 

Through Cantwell’s seat on the Finance Committee, she was able to nearly triple the federal money Washington will get for qualified low-income kids and nearly quadruple money for these kids by 2012. 

CHIP is a federal program that helps states cover uninsured low-income children from families with incomes above Medicaid eligibility levels. But the rules put in place when CHIP was created in 1997 needlessly punish states that used efficiency and innovation to get health care access to even more needy kids. CHIP allows Washington to use program funds to cover children from families living on 250 percent of the poverty level or less who were not already eligible for health coverage at the time of the program’s enactment. 

 

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