Official takes issue with kids report

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said the Bush administration “skewed” a report on children’s health insurance to make the case that families were dropping private coverage to join the program.

The report on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program generally is favorable. It shows substantial reductions in both the number and rate of uninsured children since the program began a decade ago.

But Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the report released Wednesday was edited to incorporate the administration’s concerns that families leaving private insurers for the federal program.

Baucus said a final draft was submitted to the administration in January. At the time, researchers at Mathematica Policy Research Inc., which prepared the report, said such substitution of private health coverage for public coverage was “not an issue.”

But the final report contained changes that said some “crowd-out” does occur — from less than 10 percent to 56 percent, depending upon the study.

Baucus said the administration apparently “didn’t want the full success of the Children’s Health Insurance Program known — not to the Congress rewriting the CHIP law and not to the American public.”

“I’m troubled by the fact that this is not the first time we’ve seen skewed information” from the administration, he said.

Congress is expected to take up legislation next week that would renew the program for an additional five years. Democrats want to double the level sought by the administration — $60 billion versus $30 billion.

The administration has had the report since January, but officials noted that the clearance timeline was not unusual.