Children’s Health Care in MI

This is an e-mail I received from our (Michigan’s) Congressman, Mike Rogers on child health care.  Thought you might find it informative.

I write to provide you with an update on my work to extend and expand health insurance for uninsured children. I appreciate the opportunity to contact you on this matter.

Since being created with strong bipartisan support in 1997, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, known in Michigan as MIChild, has helped over six million low-income children obtain high-quality health care. This program provides kids with the care they need, and I supported its reauthorization last year.

I had hoped that with a new Congress and a new President, America would have a new opportunity to enact a bipartisan, long-term extension of this important program, and make sure that it finally reaches its goal of insuring every eligible child.

Unfortunately, today the Democratic leaders in the House have decided to place partisan politics over the needs of these children. Last night they introduced a new bill that virtually no one in Congress had ever seen before, and today they forced that bill through the House of Representatives.

The real tragedy is that this bill will do much more harm than good. Some of the obvious problems are:

The bill ignores the 500,000 low-income children and their families who are already eligible for health insurance but who have signed up.

It removes existing citizenship verification requirements - making it easier for illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded health care.

It pushes 2.4 million kids who today have private health insurance off of the plans that their parent’s selected for them and on to a government plan.

Finally, in a misguided effort to pay for it all, the bill will ban seniors on Medicare from visiting hundreds of specialty hospitals, cancer centers, pain clinics and dialysis centers.

I strongly support providing health insurance to needy children, and I will continue to work to reform and expand our most important safety nets. That is why I support legislation reauthorizing SCHIP for seven years. My proposal ensures all current SCHIP-enrolled children will remain on the program, puts poor kids first by making sure they have coverage, and requires states to verify the citizenship of SCHIP applicants to ensure funds are spent on American citizens.

As Congress continues to debate this issue, it is my hope that we will work in a bipartisan fashion to make certain low income children have long term access to health care.

Sincerely,

Mike Rogers
Member of Congress

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