The success of a society should be measured by the way it treats its children. That is why I am proud to support the Children's Health and Medicare Improvement Act of 2007 (H.R. 3162, the CHAMP Act). The CHAMP Act would provide health coverage for an additional five million uninsured children and ensure that seniors struggling to pay for cost-sharing, including premiums, deductibles and coinsurance maintain access to physicians and affordable care.
Over the past decade, SCHIP and Medicaid together have reduced the uninsured rate among low-income children by one-third. This coverage is vital to well-being of these children. Insured children are more likely to receive cost-effective, preventive services and are healthier, which leads to greater success in school and later in life.
Yet funding limitations and obstacles to outreach have left as many as six million low-income children uninsured and changes to the Medicare program have resulted in higher costs for seniors and uncertainty for physicians. The CHAMP Act makes dramatic improvements to both SCHIP and Medicare, providing coverage for 11 million low-income children and ensuring payment assistance for seniors, while providing stability for physicians who receive Medicare patients.
I am particularly proud that this bill makes important strides to reduce health disparities. It restores a states' option to provide health coverage to lawfully residing low-income children and pregnant women, an option currently supported by more than 20 states, including Nebraska, Texas and California, and more than 500 organizations across this nation. This legislation allows flexibility regarding documentation for coverage, regulations which have resulted in low-income U.S. citizens losing Medicaid coverage. The CHAMP Act also ensures that seniors have access to their doctors by stopping a 10 percent payment cut to doctors, and helps make Medicare affordable for low-income seniors who are coping with increasing premiums, co-payments and deductibles.
By working together we can ensure that all of our children have health coverage and can grow up to be healthy adults. Unfortunately, my colleagues across the aisle have chosen to filibuster health care coverage for children, engaging in two days (18 hours) of parliamentary procedures rather than debating the merits of coverage for our children. This behavior threatens the coverage of 6 million children who are already insured, prevents millions of others from receiving the care they deserve, risks access to physicians who are facing significant cuts, and places even more pressure on our health care safety net.
Ensuring millions of low-income children have access to critical health coverage is more important than political games over procedural matters. We must meet the challenge of ensuring a healthy childhood for all of America's kids and access to care for our nation's low-income seniors. The CHAMP Act does both.