CHIPping Away at the Safety Net
Federal funding ended for CHIP when Congress did not extend the program for Fiscal 2018. Colorado’s funds for CHP+ are expected to run out sometime between January and March 2018 if Congress does not act to reinstate CHIP’s funding. The best estimate says there are funds to operate through February. With the legislature set to convene next month, legislators are looking for state money to continue the service longer if necessary — at least for the sickest children. But in Colorado, finding money is unreasonably difficult.
In the 22 counties contained entirely within Colorado’s fourth congressional district, there are nearly nine thousand children and expectant mothers who rely on CHP+, Colorado’s version of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Thousands more reside in the populous counties of Adams, Arapahoe, and Boulder, which lie partially in CD4. Data are available only by county, so exact numbers for CD4 can’t be reported.
Right now, Colorado has the strongest economy in the United States. Unemployment is low. Corporate profits are high. But the state government is a beast that is slowly starving. The reason for this is the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), an amendment to the State Constitution that passed in 1992. TABOR limits the growth in state revenue from taxation to the sum of the annual inflation rate and the annual percentage change in population. Because TABOR’s simplistic formula fails to take into account such factors as changes in the relative cost of services provided by the state, TABOR has resulted in drastic cuts to“non-essential” services such as education. In 2015 Colorado ranked 49th among the states in funding for higher education.
WTF Colorado has written about the devastating effects of TABOR before, especially in its impact on the eastern plains to health care delivery. TABOR would have caused the closing of most of CD4’s rural hospitals if the 2017 legislature had not enacted the CHASE enterprise zone for hospitals, exempting provider fees from the TABOR cap. But the Republicans in the State Senate, in exchange for their support for the bill, required other revenue reductions to keep the CHASE fix to a bare minimum. A surplus in funds that CHASE would have created was eliminated. That money could have extended CHIP benefits for months.
This is intolerable. We should be burning up the ether with phone calls to Ken Buck and his wife, State Representative Perry Buck. We should be taking our children, insured or not, with us to carry signs outside our rural clinics and hospitals. And we should understand that this is only the beginning of Republican attacks on our social safety net. The deficit created by the Tax Scam bill will trigger automatic reductions in Medicare next year. Medicare! The GOP hates children and the elderly. Give grandma a sign, too.
More than this, we must risk our personal comfort and safety to protect the most vulnerable among us. Now we must become evangelists for the safety net, declaring our social values loud and proud. We must not only vote against Republicans at every opportunity, we must persuade others to do the same. It must become okay to be liberal on the plains. Register the citizen children of immigrants and help them to be fearless. Talk about the consequences of the reckless policies of this administration, and not just to each other and not just on-line. We’ve got your back: Be the change we need.
