National: Linda Lingle

Congress is currently debating legislation that would force Americans to pay billions of dollars to take an unpopular taxpayer-funded program for poor children and expand it so that non-poor, non-children will be granted access to benefits.

The program is the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a taxpayer-funded health coverage program that provides federal dollars to states in an effort to give children in working (and nonworking) poor families a health insurance safety net. SCHIP, which was created in 1997 as a supplement to Medicaid, has grown since its inception, with 41 states raising the minimum income required for enrollment and over 10 percent of the 6 million enrollees nationwide being over the age of 18.