Ninth Annual Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference / December 10-12, 2003
PEGGY BAILEY: Thank you. In Washington, we are about acronym, so the bill is called the PREEMIE bill. Actually, there are two subsets of the bill and we really want to thank the March of Dimes for leading this effort on this bill. Like Dr. Green said prematurity is not something that congress is talking about right now. So, it takes a lot of courage to stand up and say that this is something that we need to pay attention to. As I said, there are two initiatives.
There is an NIH research initiative and then there’s an insurance, increasing insurance for pregnant women initiative. For NIH, there are two bills, one is S1724, it was introduced by Senator Alexander from Tennessee and the house companion bill is HR3350 and it was introduced by Fred Upton from Michigan and both of those bills were very generic. The NI is just general research for prenatal care for NIH, the appropriation level or the authorization level is up to congress at this point right now. We expect that other groups with specific interest like pregnant women in periodontal disease and things like that will probably, as the bill moves forward, try to attack, make the bill more specific and set up carve outs for a specific funding to go to those issues. But for right now it is very general, which is good. That will help attract sponsors.
The second part, the insurance part, there is a House and Senate companion bills for that also. There is Senate bill 1734, which was introduced by Senator Lincoln and HR3293, which was introduced by Diana DeGette from Colorado and this is a more complex bill. Basically, what they have done is taken a lot of bills that have been introduced individually and put them together. This bill would increase SCHIP coverage for pregnant women to 185% of the poverty level. It would provide optional populations once the state got to a 185% of the federal poverty level, will provide funding for them to increase it beyond that.
It has the ICHIA legislation, Immigrant Children’s Health Improvement Act, which would provide States the option to cover pregnant women of legal immigrant status and their children under Medicaid and SCHIP. And they will get a federal match for that, and has some tobacco cessation parts from Medicaid and Title V on allowing Medicaid to cover tobacco cessation. There is family planning services and supplies that would be underneath this. There is also a wraparound coverage, it is really interesting, that for children who have private insurance, it would allow Medicaid to pick up services for benefits that are not covered in the child’s private health insurance. Congress has left town basically for this year. Next year, we wouldn’t see either one of these piece of legislation is certainly moving on their own. The NIH bill could be easily attached to, if Medicaid reform moved forward or if some other healthcare initiative move forward.
It could be easily attached to that, and as far as the insurance packages, it is really a large package, so we would see it being broken up and also attached to other pieces in legislation, maybe the welfare reauthorization legislation were also Medicaid reform if it get started. What you can do, is talk, what these bills need right now are sponsors. They need more House and Senate sponsors.
So, if you go to Thomas, which is the Library of Congress website, there is no www, it just starts thomas.loc.gov. If you go there and you type in any other bill number, you will find it. Therefore, if you think that this is a piece of legislation that you would like and you would like your House member or your Senator to support, you should call and write letters and ask them to co-sponsor the legislation. If anybody has any other questions, you can find me out in the audience.