Colorado SCHIP “like a kind of mess”
June 10th, 2008 | by Brian T. Schwartz |
From the Rocky Mountain News:
The state program that delivers health care to more than 53,500 needy children and pregnant women is in administrative disarray, state auditors said Monday.
A report on the Children’s Basic Health Plan found that 10 percent of patients were classified incorrectly — either as eligible when they weren’t or as ineligible when they were entitled to services. Hundreds of people were kept on the program after their eligibilty expired — for up to two years in some cases. …
Rep. Dianne Primavera, D-Broomfield, said she was “distressed” by the report. …
“It seems like kind of a mess,” said Primavera, who has worked in health care administration. …
The auditors found 831 women who remained in the program after their eligibilty should have expired. The cost associated with them is $104,000, the auditors said.
A bigger problem may be that the program is not spending enough by failing to identify thousands of kids and pregnant women who are eligible for services.
The department claims current enrollment represents more than 55 percent of those who are eligible.
But auditors found the department engaged in a series of untested assumptions in estimating the number of eligible women and children.
“These problems seriously compromise the reliability of the estimates and the penetration rates calculated and reported by the department,” the auditors wrote.
Also a problem are delays — sometimes for several months — by counties in processing applications. Federal law sets a 45-day limit.
As I commented on the website:
Hmm. If the Children’s Basic Health Plan were a non-government charity people would stop donating money to it. But since it’s government-run, the “doners,” i.e., taxpayers, would become criminals for choosing to donate the money they earn to a charity that actually deserves their donation.
A tax credit for charitable donations is one way to do this. You donate, say, $100 to a charity that helps out with kids’ health care, and two things happen:
- You get a $100 tax credit, which means you pay $100 less in taxes.
- The Children’s Basic Health Plan loses that $100. This will give the administrators incentive to do a good job.
I cannot imagine how defenders of government-run charities can oppose this idea. Do they think government-run charities cannot compete with other charities? Do they think taxpayers are too dumb to know which charity should receive their hard-earned income?
For more on charity tax credits, see this post on medical charities, and this one on how compulsory charity is immoral.
Not only that, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that state governments use Medicaid as a money laundering scheme.
(HT, Ari Armstrong.)
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