AG Abbott Wants To Pay For Child Healt Insurance By Taking Money Out Of Child Support System

[Updated to add links to our prior coverage of this issue & more--VL]

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is touting an asinine plan to fund child health care through the child support system to Texas newspapers.

He told the Tyler Morning Telegraph that he believed money for child health insurance should come out of child support payments parents make to his office.

From the TMT:

His proposal would take hundreds of thousands of dollars within the child support system, which collects on the behalf of more than 1 million children, and apply it to health care costs. Part of the parent’s responsibility, he said, is to provide medical care for the child they support but, 30 to 40 percent of supporting parents do not have access to employer-based health care.

Abbott said a parent attempting to provide health care for a single child is not feasible, but his proposal would pool more than 200,000 children who fall in that category, allowing a better opportunity for affordable coverage.

He said the proposal would match and in some cases exceed the coverage provided by the Medicaid-based Children’s Health Insurance Program. He said the plan would cost about $100 a month per child and provide better access to physicians.

Abbott said under the current guidelines, parents receive cash medical support, and there is no guarantee the child is benefiting, but his proposal would require the money be used for medical coverage.

“What it does do is it eliminates the recipient parent’s discretionary use of cash medical support, and automatically puts that money into the health care insurance plan of the children,” he said. “This is a step down the path to make sure children in Texas are covered by health insurance.”

To quote Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, “I doubt this attorney general would qualify for my staff.”

This plan is a bad idea for a lot of reasons. For one thing, most divorce decrees already specify that one parent or the other is responsible for health care costs; in many cases, it is stipulated that one parent or the other shall provide insurance for the child. The 200,000 kids that Abbott is talking about are most likely those whose parents paying support work in low-wage jobs that don’t provide insurance or provide insurance the parents cannot afford.

Additionally, the $100 a month that Abbott is proposing to take out of child support payments may be as much as half of an entire child support payment if the parent paying the support is a low-wage worker. And, last time I heard anything about CHIP, $100 a month is a lot more expensive than CHIP coverage.

Furthermore, if the kids aren’t insured and they are receiving child support, there is a good chance that they are already CHIP eligible. What is needed is more funding for CHIP and easier enrollment–not taking $100 out of the pockets of custodial parents.

This is just another attempt by a Republican to take actual cash out of the hands of poor and middle class families because Abbott believes that he knows better than the parents of the children how that money should be spent. He does not. The parents probably need all of their child support just to afford housing, food, and energy costs. All Abbott’s plan does is give children insurance that is more expensive than CHIP while putting parents in worse financial shape.

One question that arises is whether the plan is even constitutional. After all, it is only taking $100 out of the payments of some parents, not all. It seems to me an “equal protection” argument could be made that either they take $100 from everyone or take $100 from no one.

Abbott, of course, has previously proposed this plan. He did so earlier this year and is just rehashing it in advance of the 81st Texas Legislature, thinking it will help his 2010 run for Lieutenant Governor. Last year, State Rep. Garnet Coleman took the lead in explaining why this plan is a bad idea:

Coleman compared the proposal — which Abbott says is designed to provide private coverage to the 200,000 uninsured children in the system — to the Texas Healthy Kids Corporation, a public-private program mandated by the Legislature in 1997. That program dissolved not long after the start of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2000.

Texas Healthy Kids was not just for families in the child support system. But Coleman said the program relied financially on the participation of noncustodial parents who received court orders to pay for their children’s health care coverage.

The program didn’t work because many of the noncustodial parents couldn’t afford to pay for the health insurance, Coleman said, adding that Abbott’s proposal, which would require parents to buy insurance, is also unlikely to work.

Under Abbott’s plan, a private insurance company would contract with the state, and a court could order parents to buy the private insurance based on their ability to pay.

“It sounds very good and I applaud the attorney general for thinking about it,” Coleman said. “However, our experience was that, unfortunately, it did not work.”

Abbott’s proposal would require legislative action. The attorney general said Wednesday that the idea “addresses a pressing need for children in Texas in a way that keeps a watchful eye on taxpayer dollars.”

But Tom Banning, CEO of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, called the plan “a good political soundbite lacking substance.”

“With premiums rising faster than the rate of inflation, parents don’t have the money to purchase health insurance, and a court order isn’t going to change that,” he said.

Coleman put it this way: “You can’t get blood from a turnip.”