Minority caucuses to press for two SCHIP provisions

If the House brings up children’s healthcare in September, Hispanic, black and Asian members will press Speaker Nancy Pelosi to restore two controversial pro-immigrant measures.

The provisions, ending a five-year waiting period for benefits for legal immigrants and canceling a requirement that participants show proof of citizenship, were dropped last year by Democratic leaders seeking to pick up Republican votes for a veto override. Republicans criticized both measures as overly pro-immigrant.

{mosads}But before they left for the August break, representatives of the three caucuses, who together call themselves the Tri-Caucus, sent Pelosi (D-Calif.) a letter urging her to include them in any State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill.

“We understand the House may consider a children’s health insurance bill prior to the end of the 110th Congress,” said the letter, signed by the chairman and health chairman of each caucus. “We urge you to include provisions in this bill which address the needs of children in communities of color and respectfully request a meeting with you to discuss this critical issue.”

Healthcare for poor children has been a political gift that keeps giving for House Democrats. They’ve been expected to go back to that well in the run-up to the fall elections to remind voters that President Bush and Republicans in Congress blocked an expansion of the program.

But a Democratic leadership aide said the September SCHIP vote is not as definite as it once was, in part because of the possibility that the pro-immigrant measures could cause dissension in the caucus.

The aide said that Congressional Hispanic Caucus members have threatened to vote against revenue offsets supported by members of the Blue Dog Coalition if their priorities are not honored, because of the perception that centrist Blue Dogs are the most likely to oppose measures considered pro-immigrant.

Also, in July, the Senate couldn’t get cloture on an attempt to nullify Bush administration restrictions on the SCHIP program, causing leaders to question Senate support.

The five-year waiting period was enacted as part of the welfare reform negotiated between the Republican Congress and the Clinton administration.

When Democrats started drafting legislation re-authorizing SCHIP, language reversing the waiting requirement was included in every major version.

But then, efforts to pass an immigration overhaul fell apart, and Republicans started criticizing the children’s health insurance program for helping illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) included the cancellation of the waiting period in a news release laying out “20 Simple Reasons to Oppose the Democrats’ SCHIP Bill.”

“The Democrats’ bill eliminates the current five-year waiting period required for legal immigrants to receive government benefits,” the Boehner release stated.

By the time House Democrats assembled a package that was crafted to get enough votes to override President Bush’s veto, the measure removing the waiting period was itself removed from the bill.

So was the proposal to end citizen documentation requirements. The requirement has been criticized for adding red tape while delivering limited cost savings. A July 2007 Government Accountability Office analysis found that the documentation requirements cost much more to implement than they have saved.

Democratic legislators also contend that many U.S. citizens have been excluded because their parents can’t find the needed documentation. The TriCaucus letter said 11,000 children in Virginia and 14,000 children in Kansas have lost healthcare coverage.

But Republicans say eliminating the requirement, part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, opens the program to illegal immigrants.

When Democrats tried to eliminate the requirement, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), one of Congress’s most outspoken opponents of illegal immigration, called it a “socialistic plan” that subsidizes illegal aliens.

But the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) says the measures really don’t have anything to do with illegal immigration, and shouldn’t be caught up in the immigration debate.

“We had a worse bill based on an argument that had no credibility,” said Jennifer Ng’andu of NCLR. “Members of Congress are going to have to decide whether they want to put children first or put partisan politics first.”