California Kids at Stake

As soon as Saturday, 41 states may lose nearly $2 billion that Congress gave them amid much fanfare in 1997 to provide health insurance to children of working-poor families. The biggest loser could be California, which is slated to return the unspent portion of its first-year allocation--a whopping $597 million.

In Sacramento, the blame game has already begun. Staffers of Gov. Gray Davis rightly fault former Gov. Pete Wilson for setting up barriers that depressed enrollment in the state’s Healthy Families program. Healthy Families, for a small monthly premium, offers medical coverage to children in families making too much to qualify for no-cost Medi-Cal but too little to afford private health insurance. Income must be less than 250% of the federal poverty line; for a family of four the income cap is $42,625.

Gov. Davis deserves some blame for initially resisting reforms that could have accelerated the enrollment of children in Healthy Families and Medi-Cal, like automatically enrolling children who qualify for the school lunch program and allowing children to remain in Medi-Cal for a full year rather than requiring their parents to re-enroll them in the program every three months. But Davis’ achievement in increasing Healthy Families enrollment from 56,000 when he took office last year to 340,000 today is undeniably significant.

The hope now is that President Clinton will accede to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s request, made in a letter last week, to grant states a two-year extension for spending the children’s health money. Alternatively, the president could back plans now being drafted in the House Commerce and Senate Finance committees that would allow states to keep up to 60% of the money they are set to lose Sept. 30.

California officials have been privately meeting with senior Clinton administration officials this week in an attempt to save the state’s share. Vice President Al Gore’s political prospects would be brightened if the administration let California keep the money, they argue.

President Clinton, however, may see the matter differently. The state that is now to get the biggest share of the repossessed children’s health dollars is New York, where his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is running for senator. New York state, with the biggest children’s health program in the country, has already spent all of its 1998 and 1999 allotments and is now to receive $480 million of the funds that California and other states failed to spend.

However, Clinton would be unwise to summarily dismiss Feinstein’s letter, for it was co-signed by 59 other senators and the extension it proposes would benefit not only California but the 40 other states facing the loss of children’s health funding. Like all of these other states, California deserves blame for sluggishness in rolling out children’s health insurance. Still, this should not lead Washington to deny the tools needed to correct present problems, like the absence of health insurance for 2 million California children.

As Congress and Clinton mull over Feinstein’s letter, they should do their best to put health needs above partisan politics and punishment for past wrongs.