The New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times have recently reported on the current efforts to reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program ( SCHIP), the highly successful program begun in 1997 as part of the Balanced Budget Act. Thanks to this program and continued enrollment growth of Medicaid, the number of uninsured children fell from 11.1 million in 1998 to 8.3 million in 2005. As the employer-based insurance system continues to erode, more children become uninnsured, but most of these losses have been offset by SCHIP and Medicaid. This doesn't sit well with conservatives.

The Bush administration has made clear that does not like to see public health insurance programs succeed at the expense of private plans. Indianapolis businessman, Allan Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy, said White House opposition to a Democratic plan to increase SCHIP funding was " philosophical and idealogical." He went on to explain that the Democratic proposal would move the nation toward " a single-payer health care system with rationing and price controls." The administration prefers the market free-for-all. The nonpartisan CBO study of the public-private competition while stressing that no concensus exists, stated that the evidence suggests that parents who forego private coverage for their children ( if they even have a private option) do so because of better benefits, lower costs or some combination thereof.

A larger issue is the nation's investment in its children. Research has documented that investment in early childhood development, disease prevention, and health promotion yields long term benefits. Unfortuneately, the long term trends in public policy favor other age groups. The Urban Institute concluded in a report published earlier this year that in the last half century children have been a " diminishing national priority." SCHIP is a modest attempt to reverse that trend and should be supported.

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