Lawmaker Takes Issue With Editing Of Children's Health Report

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said the Bush administration ``skewed'' a report on children's health insurance to make the case that families were dropping private

Wednesday, September 19th 2007, 8:12 pm

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said the Bush administration ``skewed'' a report on children's health insurance to make the case that families were dropping private coverage to join the program.

The report on the State Children's Health Insurance Program generally is favorable. It shows substantial reductions in both the number and rate of uninsured children since the program began a decade ago.

But Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the report released Wednesday was edited to incorporate the administration's concerns that families leaving private insurers for the federal program.

Baucus said a final draft was submitted to the administration in January. At the time, researchers at Mathematica Policy Research Inc., which prepared the report, said such substitution of private health coverage for public coverage was ``not an issue.''

But the final report contained changes that said some ``crowd-out'' does occur _ from less than 10 percent to 56 percent, depending upon the study.

Baucus said the administration apparently ``didn't want the full success of the Children's Health Insurance Program known _ not to the Congress rewriting the CHIP law and not to the American public.''

``I'm troubled by the fact that this is not the first time we've seen skewed information'' from the administration, he said.

Congress is expected to take up legislation next week that would renew the program for an additional five years. Democrats want to double the level sought by the administration _ $60 billion versus $30 billion.

The administration has had the report since January, but officials noted that the clearance timeline was not unusual.

An official familiar with the report said his office worked diligently to ensure it was ready in time for the current debate. Both the House and Senate passed bills in August to expand the program. Lawmakers are expected to reconcile the difference in those bills by the end of the week.

Timothy Love, who oversees program evaluations at the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a memorandum Wednesday that one important finding in Mathematica's draft was not supported. In short, Love wrote, the study was ``overly speculative'' when it came to the conclusion that crowd-out was not a problem.

Following discussions with Mathematica, the language was changed to note a substitution range of less than 10 percent to 56 percent, depending upon the study.

Love also noted that the Congressional Budget Office has studied the competing bills and estimated that about one-third of new enrollees during the next five years would otherwise have had private coverage.

Under the children's program, about 6.6 million people get health coverage that is subsidized by the government. Congress approved the program to help those families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance.

The Mathematica report said that the percentage of uninsured children dropped from 15.5 percent to 12.8 percent during the period reviewed - 1997 through 2003. The number of uninsured children dropped from 11.7 million to 9.9 million.

The report said all of the declines in the uninsured rate were limited to children whose families with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

Kerry Weems, the acting head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the report shows what a clearly defined federal program can achieve.

``We want to see those successes continue. At the same time, we believe state efforts should be directed at children most in need,'' Weems said.