2007.10.31
Discuss Strother's column
Separating the SCHIP from the chaff
Elizabeth Strother
Surprised to see police officers, school nurses, teachers among the people in the Roanoke Valley who are looking for government-subsidized health insurance for their kids? People who have a home to live in, pay their bills, put food on the table and clothes on their children's backs and send them off to school? People who look a lot like you? Not your idea of people who are poor -- or poor enough, at any rate, to be less than self-sufficient?
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for Virginia the upper limit is $41,200 for family of 4 to be eligible for SCHIP--would have been a good piece of info for your editorial. People in Ms MAcy's article were making choices as to where they worked//how many hours they worked//and probably how many kids they had. BUSH wanted to commit MORE $$$ to SCHIP. The dem controlled congress wanted to increase funding by some 5-7 billion dollars/year and include provisions where states could increase income eligiblity limits at future dates. ANOTHER PROBLEM was how the increase was to be funded-CIGARETTE TAXES..yeah like that would have been enough.
Comment by BUD — October 31, 2007 @ 4:44 pm
SCHIP seems to be a program for people trying to get around paying for health insurance. Yes, health insurance is expensive. But so is a car payment. If you can afford $30k for a car, you can afford health insurance.
If you can't afford health insurance because you are making a hefty car payment, maybe it is time to rethink that priority. Shoot, if the government would make a car payment for me, I could get a better car.
Comment by Henry — November 1, 2007 @ 7:22 am
Okay, lets take a closer look at this, gentlemen. Hypothetical family of four living in Roanoke on 41,000 per year. That translates to roughly 32,000 after taxes, or 2700 per month income. A typical budget might look something like this...
Rent 850
Electric 90
Gas heat 90
Phone 40
Cable 40
Car payment 200x2
Car Insurance 150
School lunches 100
Gas 150
After school childcare 400
Food ($5/person/day) 600
Oops, we're already over the 2700 a month by over $200, and we haven't even accounted for car maint, clothing, medical care (copays, meds), or any sort of recreation (little league, membership at the Y, etc). So lets back up. 850 is below the cost of a 3 bedroom apartment at Pebble Creek. Maybe we should look at something less, ahem, prestigious? The rent controlled complex off Peters Creek only drops that by 90, and there are a few Salem complexes below that, but some are in a flood plain.
Maybe we can find a cheaper car? Now understand that someone running this tight of a budget probably has some credit issues, and won't be getting those 0% interest deals. Usually its more like 14%. 200 bucks a month at that interest rate will get you a 2002 Impala with 84,000 miles on it at a local dealership right now. Not exactly a $30,000 sweet ride now is it? Oh and since the warranty is up, you can throw in an additional budget item for emergency car repairs.
While we're at it, let's look at the cost of health insurance. Say the family is in perfect health, but one child was born with a small birth defect that will require future care (cleft palate for example). The estimated cost for individual family care with a tier 4 individual with a $5000 deductable will be well over $1200 per month. The child alone will be $640. And if something happens that someone has to be hospitalized? Where will they get the 5k deductable? An HSA account is supposed to cover that, but that adds another 200 dollars to the monthly budget, which is already well over the income.
And they have a choice as to where they work.... $10 an hour is an average wage for someone without a college education or access to vocational training. 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year is $20,800. Working extra means extra child care expenses, which often exceed any additional income. The same is true for school in the short term, and the current level of financial aid does not cover child care expenses during the freshman and sophomore years.
So gentlemen, I ask you, where exactly is our family of four going to come up with the money to cover private insurance? It is precisely those people for whom Famis was created, and precisely those people from whom Mr. Bush would like to remove those benefits.
Comment by DT — November 1, 2007 @ 8:32 am
Perhaps that family of four might have thought about their finances and their ability to care for all those children before they had them. As a single mother, I could not afford more than one child and that is all I had. If you cannot afford to take care of 2 or 3, perahps having a fourth with the idea that someone else will pay some of your bills was not a smart choice. And I secured a job with good health insurance for my child. It wasn't the job of my dreams but it offered medical and dental for me and my child. It's about choices.
Comment by Susan — November 1, 2007 @ 9:07 am
Here's a better idea. Let's look at the average family. The average family doesn't hve a child with a major medical issue. The average family can have two cars with no payments (like me). The average family can get a job at Virginia Tech where pre-existing conditions are covered and health insurance for 4 is about the cost of a car payment. The average family probably doesn't have major credit issues. The average family gets health insurance BEFORE they have a baby because babies are expensive like that.
I'm driving a car with 130,000 miles so I can pay for someone to drive a new car instead of paying for health insurance? What's up with that?
Mr Bush didn't tell these people to dump their health insurance. They did it themselves. They decided to quit their job with the health insurance and work for themselves and just take their chances. Or they looked at the coverage at work and decided to spend that money on something else.
If you want to look at compassion, try this : An old lady is trying to pay for her presciption medication and the government will come along and say "We need more of your money because Bob next door would rather have a new truck than health insurance for his kids".
Comment by Henry — November 1, 2007 @ 9:21 am
Some of the comments on this blog absolutely amaze me. I've pointed out no less than a dozen times that the KIDS have no choice or say in the matter and they're the ones that are suffering because of poor choices.
Some of you seem to think that you can waltz into any employer, park your fanny in the HR office and get a job. If that's not a dilusional approach, I don't know what is. There are good employers out there who offer great insurance benefits for their employees. The sad fact of the matter is that they can not open their doors to everyone needing a job. They simply don't have that many available jobs in their organization.
In the meantime, well meaning and hardworking people are faced with choices that no one wants to make but yet are forced to do. Running concurrent with that is the fact that the children who are the subject of this debate didn't ask to be brought into this world. They didn't ask to be conceived in the first place.
Yet they are the pawns in this debate and they are the ones who are forced to suffer because of the so called adults inability to act responsibly and sensibly.
Some might argue that liberals are death mongers by supporting a pro choice position, but I also believe that conservatives are also death mongers by abandoning the child after it's born.
THE CENTRAL FOCUS IS THE CHILD. LET'S NOT FORGET THAT.
Comment by Will — November 1, 2007 @ 11:15 am
No, the central focus is INSURANCE. The child can still get health care. Health care is not dependent on insurance. If you don't want to pay for insurance, you elect to pay out of pocket for health care. Yes, it will be expensive but that is a choice that people are willing to make.
Maybe the Roanoke Times will agree to do a study showing how many employers in the area do not offer health insurance.
Comment by Henry — November 1, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
I think some of you are making the assumption that life happens in a coordinated well planned way. If that's the case for you, wow I'm really ecstatic for you.
Say for a minute that you worked at one of the furniture factories in Martinsville or Rocky Mount. You were doing well, had great benefits, got married, and had a couple kids. Life was grand. Then bam, the plant shuts down. You try to find a job locally, but you can't, so you move. All of your working life has been spent running one machine doing one thing, but you can't find a job that is anything similar to what you have experience with previously. As a result, you have to take an entry level job somewhere else doing something else (because you cant afford to go back to college), and the new job doesn't offer benefits. You didn't plan on any of this happening, especially back when you were making twice your current income with benefits and making the decision whether to have kids. It is certainly out of the question to think about placing your children for adoption, so what else are you to do?
You're talking as if this is a choice these people make. In some cases that might be true, but good grief, what if all the police officers who couldnt afford insurance left their jobs to go work at Virginia Tech? Or the teachers? Or the nurses? They are making a choice to fill positions that are vital to our community. All of us are part of the problem that creates this situation. We fuss about increased spending on law enforcement and education, which in turn affects the salaries and available benefits for these individuals. We have soldiers out fighting for our country who have to apply for welfare and look to food banks to support their families, and yet we don't want to give the soldiers an increase in pay. We choose to buy foreign made goods, which in turn forces local manufacturing businesses to cut costs as much as possible to compete, and employee benefits are usually the first to go.
Recently, TAP produced a document called The State of the Poor in the Roanoke Valley. In it, the annual minimum expenses for a single parent with one child was computed as 30,576, and a two parents with two children family was 41,148. However, the federal poverty line for those two families was listed as 13,200 and 20,000 respectively (by the way, Henry, that was without a car payment). The report goes on to say that just over 13% of the valley's residents are uninsured. That means that more than one in ten working families are affected by these issues, families are paying taxes just like you. Yeah they could quit their jobs, live on the dole, and qualify for Medicaid - but they're NOT. They're out their bustin rump every day trying to make ends meet the hard way, and people like some of you have to slap them in the face when they need a little leg up. Yet I don't see you protesting some of the other federal, state, and local spending sprees that have gone on lately at the taxpayers' expense.
As the commercial says, "life comes at you fast." I just hope some of you don't have to learn the hard way just how quickly your soft little rug can get snatched out from under your feet.
Comment by DT — November 1, 2007 @ 2:58 pm
I think you are basing your assumptions on limited cases. The vast majority of people who could benefit from SCHIPS are doing fairly well. They are at least eligible for a job that has health insurance.
There are actally a lot of working families on Medicare. You see it a lot with single working moms. SCHIP is meant to carry people from Medicare on up. It's primarily aimed at people who choose to work in jobs where health insurance is not available. IIRC SCHIP is a liability to the state. The more people who use it, the more money the state loses. We have to make up that money somehow. Cigarette taxes will not do it. If people decide to ditch their company health insurance for the cheaper SCHIP, we could end up in a real financial hole. Who is going to fill that hole?
Compassion is always easier to practice when you are picking someone else's pocket to perform it.
Comment by Henry — November 1, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
First of all, Henry, I think you're confusing Medicare - which provides coverage for the elderly - with Medicaid, which provides coverage for the poor.
Secondly, do you have any evidence at all to back up your contenction that, "The vast majority of people who could benefit from SCHIPS are doing fairly well"?
Comment by Dan Radmacher — November 1, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
DT, A couple of things:
$850 rent is fairly extravagant for rent.
This family would easily qualify for free school lunch.
At $12.50 an hour for afterschool childcare, I'd damn well find another babysitter.
Why do they have cable if they're over their heads?
Comment by Josh — November 1, 2007 @ 6:33 pm
Will said "Some might argue that liberals are death mongers by supporting a pro choice position, but I also believe that conservatives are also death mongers by abandoning the child after it's born."
Help me understand your position. Who has abandoned the "child"? Are they orphans? If not, and the parents do not provide, are they "death mongers"? By what moral authority do you place responsiblity for the care of a child on strangers but not on the parents?
I ask becasue you referred to "conservatives" as death mongers but didn't mention the parents of children who do not provide adequate support.
I can see where one would feel compasion for a sick child with no resources, but to refer to others who may oppose social programs targeting such a child as "death mongers" leads me to believe yours is a position of politics and not of the heart.
Comment by Traderd — November 1, 2007 @ 8:38 pm