- NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Some
145,000 poor children were dropped from a U.S. federal-state health insurance
plan in the second half of 2003, with more than half the cuts made by Texas,
a health-care research foundation said on Friday.
-
- "The drop in (the) State Children's Health Insurance
Program is a major setback when millions of uninsured children are eligible
but not yet enrolled," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
-
- Net enrollment in the program, which mainly benefits
working families, fell last year for the first time since it was launched
in 1998, the Washington, D.C.-based Kaiser Commission said in a report.
-
- In many cases, states made the cuts because a weak economy
left them with huge budget deficits.
-
- Along with Texas, two other states -- Maryland and New
York -- accounted for most of the cuts in the program last year. The two
eastern states each cut 23,000 low-income children, the report said.
-
- A total of 11 states sliced enrollment, with "noteworthy"
cuts made in Florida, Colorado and South Carolina, the report said.
-
- The number of needy children who got this health insurance
peaked in June 2003 at 3.964 million. Though 37 states added children to
the program in the second half of last year, the total number still fell
by 37,000 children, the report added.
-
- In some cases, the number of children fell because they
were shifted to Medicaid, which provides health care for more impoverished
children and adults, the report noted.
-
- Still, that was not the case in some of the states that
clipped enrollment, including Texas. That state stopped covering "a
broad range of services," including glasses, eye and teeth exams,
and services by chiropractors, hospices and skilled nursing centers, the
report said.
-
- The health insurance for children remains popular, the
report said, noting it was protected from early rounds of cost cuts by
its "relatively low cost per enrollee."
-
- The program cost the federal government $3.7 billion
and the states $1.6 billion in fiscal 2002, the most recent data available,
according to Kaiser Commission spokesman Rakesh Singh.
-
- "Typically, kids are fairly cheap to provide health
insurance for," he said.
-
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