The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is a United States federal government program that gives funds to states in order to provide health insurance to families with children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid. At its creation in 1997, SCHIP was the largest expansion of health insurance coverage for children in the U.S. since Medicaid began in the 1960s. The statutory authority for SCHIP is under title XXI of the Social Security Act. It was sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy in a partnership with Senator Orrin Hatch with key support coming from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Clinton administration.
States are given flexibility in designing their SCHIP eligibility requirements and polices within broad federal guidelines. Some states have received authority through waivers of statutory provisions to use SCHIP funds to cover the parents of children receiving benefits from both SCHIP and Medicaid, pregnant women, and other adults. SCHIP covered 6.6 million children and 671,0000 adults at some point during Federal fiscal year 2006, and every state has an approved plan. However, the program is already facing funding shortfalls in several states. Attempts to expand funding for the program have met with political controversy amidst studies that debate the program's fiscal impacts. Two proposals passed by the Congress in 2007 to reauthorize and expand SCHIP from an average of $5 billion yearly to approximately $12 billion yearly over the next five years were vetoed by President George W. Bush. At the end of 2007, President Bush signed an extension of the program to cover current enrollment levels through March 2009.
Despite SCHIP, the number of uninsured children continues to rise, particularly among families that cannot qualify for SCHIP. An October 2007 study by the Vimo Research Group found that 68.7 percent of newly uninsured children were in families whose incomes were 200 percent of the federal poverty level or higher.
