Snubbing a Bonanza for Kids

A gold rush of federal funding--$1.7 billion over the next year and a half--is streaming from Washington to help California extend health insurance to uninsured children. But sometimes the Wilson administration seems to want less rather than more of the windfall.

The ultimate recipients would be children whose working-poor families earn too much to qualify for Medi-Cal but don’t have employer insurance; up to 580,000 kids in the state theoretically could be helped. California has created a program to distribute the money, called Healthy Families, but so far has earmarked only $140 million of it. Since any money the state doesn’t use within two years will be handed over to other states, Sacramento should be enrolling as many eligible children as possible. But just the opposite is happening.

Last week, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed adding new restrictions that would disqualify tens of thousands of needy children. Under the present criteria, families qualify if their income is less than 200% of the federal poverty level--in California, $21,700 for a parent and one child. As with Medi-Cal, the rules let parents deduct expenses for child care, child support and a few other things when officials determine eligibility.

Wilson’s office now proposes eliminating those deductions. The change would needlessly confuse families and social workers by creating different eligibility systems for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families. More harmfully, many working-poor families would lose eligibility for the program. And because fees are on a sliding scale, others still eligible would have to pay more. A family with three children, for instance, could see its monthly Healthy Families premium rise to $27 from $14 as income neared the 200% level.

That doesn’t sound like much to the well-paid, but to families with yearly incomes in the mid-20s, the expense would be onerous.

The Wilson administration says the income deductions violate a state law requiring that the new federal funds be extended only to youngsters in families with gross incomes equal to or below 200% of the poverty level. But the state Legislature gave the Healthy Families board wide authority to define how those incomes are determined, and the state’s Office of Administrative Law approved the deductions last year.

The state’s Healthy Families board should reject the governor’s proposal at its meeting Thursday. The original Healthy Families income criteria, the ones that led the federal government to earmark $1.7 billion for California, are now the law, having been signed last November by Gov. Wilson. Wilson administration officials told Times reporter Virginia Ellis last week that it was in fact not the governor who signed that measure but rather the governor’s automatic pen.

A ridiculous distinction. Whoever or whatever signed the original Healthy Families plan did the right thing, and the signature should be allowed to stand.