A variety of commentators, including Sarah Dine, have attributed congressional ambivalence on the issue of expanded SCHIP funding to insufficient national emphasis on the well-being of children. However, as Grace-Marie Turner points out, much of the money allocated for SCHIP has been diverted to adult patients. She provides a variety of examples, including the following:
In 2005, 87 percent of Minnesota’s SCHIP enrollees were adults, as were 66 percent of those enrolled in Wisconsin’s program … In Arizona—which has one of the highest rates of uninsured children in the nation—56 percent of those enrolled in SCHIP were adults.
SCHIP is a program for children, but these and other states are deliberately misusing the funds. So, the problem here is not some sort of national callousness toward children, but the bureaucratic perversion of a program specifically designed to provide for their health care.
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