Letter To Editor Criticizes Recent Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece Addressing SCHIP Legislation

August 9, 2007 – 7:33 pm | posted in Medicare

John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, did not “let the facts get in the way of his ideological attack” on legislation that would expand SCHIP in a July 27 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, writes in a letter to the editor of the Journal. According to Greenstein, in the opinion piece, Goodman wrote that “almost all” children who would obtain health insurance through SCHIP and Medicaid under the legislation “already have insurance.”

However, Greenstein writes, the Congressional Budget Office recently found that “about two-thirds of the children who would gain coverage under the pending House or Senate bills are now uninsured.” He adds that “health experts agree that you can’t realistically find a way to extend coverage to more of the uninsured without also providing coverage to some who already get it elsewhere.”

The legislation would “bring coverage to four [million] to five million lower-income children who otherwise would have none,” Greenstein writes, adding, “One would never know this from Mr. Goodman’s diatribe” (Greenstein, Wall Street Journal, 8/7).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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