Orrin Hatch: “why do we need 8 billion on top of the 16 billion already appropriated? We learned earlier that the House Commerce block…”

“why do we need 8 billion on top of the 16 billion already appropriated? We learned earlier that the House Commerce block grant may be scored as reaching only 860,000 uninsured children. I understand that this is a complicated matter because some funds will be used for direct services and not to purchase insurance. But it just shows you that this whole area is not cheap. We heard from Bruce Vladeck it costs about $1,000 or so for a good, solid insurance policy. We also know that the Federal share of Medicaid this year averages about $860 per child. In the first year of the CHILD Program there will be an even 50/50 split between health care and deficit reduction so that $3 billion will be used for program costs. In year five, this program component will grow to $5 billion. Using these numbers as a guide, it seems reasonable to expect that, depending a great deal how states chose to implement this program that our bill will be able to cover about 3.5 million or so children in the early years of the program and about 5 million children in the fifth year. There are many variables such as which States chose to participate, what their State matching requirement is, what coinsurance and copayments they require, and so on. We must also take into account inflation which will erode the purchasing power of the yearly allocation. Another way to look at the problem is to see how many children the $16 billion in the budget agreement could cover.”