EDITORIAL: CHIP: Rockefeller rescue

When you set out to provide universal health care for everyone, do you begin by dismantling existing programs that already deliver care to some part of the population? Apparently some in the U.S. Senate think so.

A Senate Finance Committee health bill, as it was written last week, would have essentially gutted the Children's Health Insurance Program. That might be OK if senators replaced CHIP with something as good or better.

But the Finance Committee bill would have transferred 14 million children, including about 25,000 in West Virginia, to commercial insurance companies that would not have been required to offer the same level of service these children now receive. Parents would have been asked to choose from a list of private insurers. State and federal taxpayers would still pick up the cost, but this time, for-profit bureaucracy would take a slice.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that shifting kids over to public-subsidized private insurance companies would cost at least $15 billion more than caring for the same kids under CHIP.

So, that would be less health care and higher overhead. What a deal.

Thankfully, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who led the effort to create CHIP for the children of working parents back in the 1990s, convinced other senators that this was a bad idea. They amended the committee's bill so that it now retains CHIP until at least 2019. Hurrah.

Surely, by then this country will have figured out the best way to make sure all Americans gets the health care they need. There is still a long way to go to that goal.

It would be great if Congress could get its act together and set up a system that everyone pays into and that covers everyone, a system that lets everyone go to the doctor when needed, that rewards accuracy and efficiency and punishes greed and dishonesty. On such a day, the country will no longer need the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Until then, the last thing anyone needs is to mess with a good, efficient program that serves the children of working parents.