Before Congress adjourned for the holidays, its members passed a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government funded through Jan. 19. With that bill was a small amount of additional funding for CHIP - the Children's Health Insurance Program.
But the short-term fix falls woefully short. In fact, at best, it will fund health care services for the 9 million children covered by CHIP only through March 2018.
Plenty of news reports contain talk about the Children's Health Insurance Program being "popular" on both sides of the political aisles of Congress. But if that's true, why did the funding run out on Sept. 30 and Congress fail to reauthorize a long-term appropriation for it?
The federal funding for the program is distributed to the states, and administered there. In Tennessee, it's known as CoverKids (and a portion of TennCare). In Georgia, it's Peachcare for Kids, and in Alabama it's All Kids. It doesn't just cover children from poor families. It also covers the kids in middle-class families who can't afford the cost of their employers' family coverage or who work where no insurance is available.
States have been warning for some time that children would lose their coverage if lawmakers didn't act fast.
The public has been worried, too. If you remember Jimmy Kimmel's impassioned story of his newborn's heart surgeries and his worries for sick children born in less fortunate families, you should understand that the dwindling CHIP funding was what he meant when he said the health of those less fortunate children is "especially threatened right now."
The federal government spends about $14.5 billion on CHIP each year. The short-term fix passed by Congress is for $2.85 billion. One doesn't have to be a math genius to see the shortfall.
CHIP was enacted with bipartisan congressional support in 1997, and it has been regularly funded by both Republicans and Democrats for 20 years.
Now, thanks to a dysfunctional Washington, it's on life support. Amid the chaotic and partisan fighting of politics in the richest country in the world, our so-called leaders can't agree on how to fund it.
Paul Krugman, a columnist with The New York Times, has called it "the Republican War on Children," and he posed a pointed question with a reference to the recent tax cuts bill that raises the estate tax exemption to $22 million: "Would you be willing to take health care away from a thousand children with the bad luck to have been born into low-income families so that you could give millions of extra dollars to just one wealthy heir?"
That is what is happening. And it probably will get worse before it gets better. After all, Republicans already are talking about slashing Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to trim the $1.5 trillion that the tax cuts bill will add to the federal deficit.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, who helped create CHIP, now says the reason it's in trouble "is that we don't have money anymore." Then he promptly voted for tax cuts, and we'll now have less money. Go figure.
Tennessee is in better shape than most states, according to the Tennessee Justice Center. CHIP funding will not run out here until early summer.
Georgia and Alabama, before the short-term fix, were on schedule to run out of CHIP money sometime between early January and the end of March, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of Medicaid officials in 50 states.
The Republicans who voted to help the rich people skate out of taxes but can't find a way to provide children's health care are morally bankrupt.
Kelly Whitener, of Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy's Center for Children and Families, recently blogged about the too-little, short-term funding:
"States will continue to spend their time and money planning for the end of CHIP. And families will continue to question whether their children's coverage will end this month or next. With bipartisan and bicameral agreement on a five-year CHIP funding deal, it's not at all clear why we find ourselves here today. My best guess is that politics came first, not people. What a disappointing way to end the year."
What an understatement.