From Savannah (Ga.) Morning News
IT MIGHT take the Wizard of Oz to rectify the state House’s plan to fix PeachCare by kicking thousands of children off the eligibility rolls. The scheme lacks both brains and heart.
PeachCare is aimed at insuring the children of the working poor who cannot afford private insurance. The House plan, backed by Speaker Glenn Richardson, would tighten income eligibility for PeachCare from $40,350 for a family of three down to $34,340 in annual income. That’s expected to force 22,000 children into the ranks of the uninsured. For those who are left on the rolls, the House bill would require new premiums for dental and vision care.
In his wisdom, Speaker Richardson noted that when he was a kid, his parents had no insurance and simply paid for health care when the need arose. Of course, when Mr. Richardson was a kid, doctors still charged about $20 to do a house call.
The speaker’s comments exhibit what can only politely be described as profound ignorance of the difference between pay increases compared to skyrocketing health care costs over the past 40 years. Beyond those financial disparities, the House plan is short-sighted on two levels.
The first, is that if parents can’t afford health insurance for their children, they will be more likely to try to treat their children at home, and wait until an illness is dire before finally going to an emergency room for care. Emergency rooms constitute one of the costliest ways of treating patients, and the costs of indigent care are also paid for by state dollars. That means failure to treat kids when problems are small - through PeachCare - will result in a higher bill to taxpayers down the line.
The second way Mr. Richardson’s plan in short-sighted is that it is not the state funding that has fallen short for PeachCare - it’s the federal government funding formula that resulted in the shortfall.
According to Rep. Mickey Channell, R-Greensboro, the federal government views those children already on PeachCare as no longer uninsured, and therefore cuts funding by the number of children the state has enrolled. That means the better Georgia does at fulfilling the purpose of the program, the less federal money it gets. But the new Democratic Congress aims to fix that funding loophole, investing more money into the insurance program.
In contrast to the House plan, the state Senate’s budget proposal has much less pork and more money for PeachCare. Instead of loading the bill with pet projects in the midyear budget, the Senate plan actually adds $81 million for PeachCare coverage.
State senators say some of the House projects could be funded four months later in the next fiscal year. In the meantime, the Senate plan buys the state time for the U.S. Congress to refigure the funding procedure for PeachCare and its sister programs in other states.
The state House and Senate must now meet to hammer out differences in their budget proposals. For the sake of Georgia’s children, we hope the compromise bill looks more like the Senate plan.
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