In two months, when Alejandra Borunda’s 8-year-old son awakes screaming with one of his regular ear infections, she will pause before deciding whether to take him to a doctor.
In two months, when Borunda’s 11-year-old daughter asks about the braces the orthodontist has said she needs, Borunda will try to turn the conversation elsewhere.
Borunda’s kids are among the more than 75,000 children and pregnant women in Colorado covered under the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And, unless Congress acts in the next two months to renew the 20-year-old program, they will be uninsured.
“My daughter is only 11 years old, and she is worried about insurance coverage,” Borunda said. “I don’t think this should affect children.”
“This” is the ongoing debate on the structure of the nation’s health care system and the role of insurance. After a summer spent battling over Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the debate has now shifted to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which provides coverage for the young ones in families that make just enough to be above the cutoff for Medicaid. Federal funding for the program officially expired last month.
Colorado’s version of the program is called the Child Health Plan Plus, or CHP+. The state spends about $185 million per year on CHP+, according to a report by the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, and nearly 90 percent of that money comes from federal funds given to the state. The program also charges some enrollment fees and copays.
Without renewal from Congress, Colorado has enough money to run CHP+ until the end of January, said Marc Williams, a spokesman for Health Care Policy and Financing.
But, starting Monday, Williams’ department will begin sending letters to every family covered under CHP+, notifying them that their kids’ health insurance could end Jan. 31 and advising those families to begin lining up alternate coverage now. In two more weeks, if Congress still hasn’t acted, Williams said the department will begin sending out official notices of the program’s cancellation.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that it won’t come to that and that Congress can get this resolved,” he said.
Bills are pending in the U.S. House and Senate to renew CHIP, and lawmakers of both parties have expressed support to extending the program. But the bills also have differences that need to be sorted out, meaning renewal won’t be a quick process — even though some states could run out of money for their CHIP programs in the next month.
That has families in Colorado who rely on CHP+ worried about what the future holds.
“I’m not in a situation where I can provide health care to my family without the government’s assistance,” said TC Bell, a college student whose two daughters are covered by CHP+. “That’s why I’m in school, to make my life better so I can get off these programs.”
Bell, who also works for an advocacy organization called Young Invincibles and receives his health care courtesy of Colorado’s Medicaid expansion, said his kids, luckily, are healthy. Regular check-ups and vaccinations are about all they currently use their coverage for. But, he said, CHP+ also provides less tangible benefits.
“The biggest thing is that sense of security,” he said.
For Borunda, the reliance on CHP+ is more urgent. She took her son, Raul, to the emergency room three times last year for painful ear infections, and her daughter, Natalia, has been bugging her about getting braces.
“She needs braces,” Borunda said. “And braces are, like, $3,000.”
Borunda is a single mother who said she is uninsured as a result of her immigration status — she is a legal resident but not eligible for Medicaid, she said. She is working toward a degree in health care policy, and she has worked in the eye care industry and founded a nonprofit to help poor patients receive eye surgery.
In the future, she said, she would like her work to focus even more on bringing health care to those who need it most. But, in two months, she said she will face a more immediate concern: How to bring health care to her own family.
“We’re causing more damage to the country by not renewing this program,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
