It’s bad enough that Congress continues to play politics with the war. Now they are playing politics with little kids.

Despite broad bi-partisan support in the capitol for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the new leadership in Congress has settled on a divisive scheme to score political points rather than reach a reasonable solution.

Meanwhile, families of the working poor are left wondering if their kids will have health insurance past Christmas.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I was serving my first term in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1997 when the federal CHIP program was born. Republican Congressional leaders and Democrat President sat down together to tackle a difficult health care problem. Their goal: create an efficient way to help provide health insurance for children of working parents who didn’t make enough money to afford private coverage.  

I believed then as I do now: CHIP is great preventative medicine, keeping families healthier, avoiding more serious illnesses later and helping reduce congestion in our hospital emergency rooms. It’s delivered by private insurance plans, not the government. And it saves money by preventing expensive treatments and surgeries whose costs inevitably get shifted to other payers.  

CHIP is critical help for Texas families, especially for single moms and parents who work for small businesses. In our state, a family of four making $41,300 a year or less can get help. Right now Texas is covering about 57% of those kids. Our state legislators, to their credit, are working to enroll another 130,000 children.

I’m frustrated because the House bill voted on in July to extend CHIP allowed government subsidies to families making over $100,000 a year and paid for it by slashing $50 billion from Medicare. Robbing Peter to pay Paul for this unjustified expansion would have kicked millions of elderly, including 800,000 Texas seniors, off their preferred Medicare Advantage plans. These plans, by the way, are the most popular among rural, poor and minority seniors. Only in Washington do politicians pit grandchildren against their grandparents. I strongly opposed that bill.

To be fair, the newest version is better. The income limits are more reasonable and it doesn’t ax Medicare. Unfortunately, having been negotiated in secret and forced to a House vote with less than 24 hours to study it, this version is fatally flawed as well.

The new CHIP bill is bad for the federal budget because the independent Congressional Budget Office confirms barely half of its $112 billion cost over the next decade is paid for. At a time of large federal deficits and facing a looming crisis in Medicare and Medicaid, shouldn’t Congress be fully funding a major expansion like this? Didn’t the GOP get fired from running Congress for the same type of fiscal irresponsibility?  

It’s bad for taxpayers because it allows too much of the current abuse – like covering adults without children - to continue for many years. The bill expansively grows the program four times its current size without first focusing on covering the kids of the working poor it was meant to serve. And it depends on a declining source of revenue – tobacco taxes – to cover a major increase in spending. (It is estimated that 22 million new smokers in America will be needed to meet the tobacco funding projections. With tongue in cheek, some have suggested that Washington ought to require each new child applying for CHIP to bring a new smoker with them.)

The measure also abandons current law restricting benefits to legal citizens and opens the door for those fraudulently using someone else’s Social Security number to receive health care coverage, as well as those who have illegally overstayed their visas. The Social Security Administration warned Congress just last week that these are serious loopholes, but the new leadership in Congress is not listening.    

The President has vowed to veto this bill and he should.

Just as President Clinton in 1996 vetoed an early version of the popular welfare reform bill in order to force both parties in Congress to work out a bi-partisan solution, I am hopeful that following President Bush’s veto that Congressional Democrat leaders will finally stop playing political games and sit down with Republicans in the House as well as the Senate who support children’s health insurance but have justified reservations about the current proposal.    

There is a reasonable, fiscally responsible solution if we’ll simply work together to find it.

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Congressman Brady represents the 8th District of Texas. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee which shares oversight of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program.