17,000 Kids Just Dropped From CHIP

I’m on a CHIP Conference Call with the Center for Public Priorities right now and just heard that 17,000 kids were dropped from CHIP this month. This is a 14 percent drop and its the largest drop in one month in the history of CHIP.

Reportedly, DHS says this was a group of kids who were held onto the program that supposedly had information missing in their files or applications, and were being held until that came in.

However, it is also reported that most of these disenrollments were in error. Furthermore, these families reportedly got a letter on Saturday telling them they’d be disenrolled on Monday. This is terrible.

That means that, since the 2003 budget cuts, we’ve had 197,000 kids knocked off chip thanks to the cuts and privitization. Consider that Reliant Stadium in Houston holds 70,000 people. You could fill that thing more than twice with the kids who have been knocked off CHIP.

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