Catholic News Service , June 4, 2007
Faith leaders urge quick action to expand children's health insurance
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholic representatives joined with Jewish and Christian
faith leaders in calling for quick action by Congress to fund health insurance
coverage for the nation's 9 million uninsured children.
"We speak from a broad range of religious traditions representing many
millions of families in urging you to craft SCHIP legislation that will help
our nation see a day when no child goes without treatment or relies on an emergency
room for his or her primary health care," the leaders said in a letter
to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.,
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
SCHIP is the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The committee was expected
to take up in June the budget resolution that calls for spending $50 billion
over five years to expand the program.
"The faith community worked extraordinarily hard to see that the Senate
and House included $50 billion in new funding in the budget resolution,"
said the June 7 letter to Baucus and Reid, made public June 12. "We want
to see these funds used to support a strong SCHIP reauthorization."
The leaders also called for giving greater flexibility to states under the program
and said states should be allowed to expand income-eligibility levels and to
cover pregnant women and legally documented immigrant children under their plans.
"States that see covering parents as a way of covering more children
should not be undermined," the letter added.
The religious leaders pledged to continue an "unprecedented grass-roots
campaign to rally people of faith" around the issue of SCHIP
reauthorization.
"Through hundreds of local events, tens of thousands of contacts with members
of Congress and scores of Op-Ed pieces and letters to the editor, people of
faith are making their voices heard on the need for a strong SCHIP reauthorization,"
they added.
Catholic leaders signing the letter included Jesuit Father John Baumann, executive
director of PICO National Network in Oakland, Calif., a network of faith-based
community organizations; Kevin E. Lofton, president and CEO of Catholic Health
Initiatives, a Denver-based national health system founded by 12 congregations
of women religious; and Good Shepherd Sister Gayle Lwanga Crumbley, national
coordinator of the National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.
Father Baumann founded PICO, which began in 1972 as the Pacific Institute for
Community Organizations but changed its name in 2004 to People Improving Communities
through Organizing.
Other signers represented the National Council of Churches, International Council
of Community Churches, Armenian Church of America, Religious Action Center of
Reform Judaism, Episcopal Church, National Council of Jewish Women, United Church
of Christ, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Methodist Church, American Baptist
Churches in the U.S.A., National Baptist Convention, African Methodist Episcopal
Church and American Baptist Women's Ministries.
"The faith community worked hard to win $50 billion in new funding in the
budget resolution," said Father Baumann in a news release. "We expect
congressional leaders to use these funds to reach millions of uninsured children
in our nation."
Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops