Hawaii is ending the only state universal child health-care program in the country, after just 7 months.
The Keiki (Child) Care Plan was designed to offer health care insurance to the children of parents who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid or Hawaii’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), but are felt not to be able to afford private coverage.
State officials found that families were dropping private coverage in order to enroll their children in the “free” plan In fact 85 percent of the children in Keiki Care were previously in a private, nonprofit plan costing $55 per month. Facing budgetary shortfalls, Governor Linda Lingle pulled the plug on funding.
“All this is a lesson for political leaders in Washington who are drafting plans now to expand SCHIP to children in families earning up to $82,000 a year or more. That expansion would wind up doing what Keiki Care did: mainly crowd out the private coverage that millions of middle-income kids already have,” writes Grace-Marie Turner (NY Post 10/27/08).
According to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, SCHIP crowds out private insurance 60 percent of the time. California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin have turned back from major efforts to approach universal coverage because of the prohibitive cost. Massachusetts officials no longer claim that such a goal is even possible, Turner writes.
Two Massachusetts safety-net hospitals, Boston Medical Center and Cambridge Health Alliance, will be cutting programs because of state cuts of more than $200 million in payments to Medicaid providers (Boston Globe 10/17/08).
Designed to cover 3,500 children, Keiki Care was a small-scale program. Fiscal problems were evident when only 2,000 children had enrolled. Larger programs lead to fiscal disaster (Investors Business Daily 10/20/08).
Tennessee’s disastrous experiment with universal coverage “forced dozens of hospitals out of business, pushed thousands of doctors and other health care professionals out of the state, destroyed any semblance of competitive health insurance market, and nearly drove the state government into bankruptcy,” writes Patrick Poole (American Thinker 1/17/07).
The state budget was in such straits that a state income tax was proposed, precipitating the Tennessee Tax Revolt of 2000. Thousands of citizens swarmed into downtown Nashville, and traffic came to a virtual standstill, as cars blared their horns from 7:30 a.m. well into the night. Legislators abandoned the income tax proposal and fled. Poole described it as the “most exhilarating experience I have been privileged to…witness….” Democrat Gov. Phil Bredesen was forced to dismantle TennCare piecemeal.
People like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proposed to inflict state health insurance on all residents of California, including illegal aliens, should go to Tennessee if they need a heart valve replaced, suggests Poole, to see first-hand the results of universal health care.