| By Bob Weaver
President George Bush has made it clear he plans to veto the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
"Forty-thousand West Virginia children with health insurance would immediately lose their health insurance as of September 30th. No questions asked. Gone!" said Senator Jay Rockefeller.
The social service cut is one of many efforts to bring the out-of-control national budget back in line, with the projected cost of the Iraq war running as high as one trillion dollars.
Rockefeller sat down with WV educators, parents, students and healthcare workers to talk about the program.
President Bush says CHIP has turned into an entitlement program in some states and the spending has gotten way out of hand.
Frontline school health clinic programs will close.
Riverside High School principal Paula Potter says school health programs are invaluable and have made a visible change in the health of students who didn't have access to insurance coverage before.
"If they can come to school and see the people here at our health clinic and know that they have health coverage, they're not only getting their health issues resolved, they're able to attend school and to graduate," Potter said.
The CHIP program has been a stop-gap effort to bring healthcare to children in a country where 50 million people are uninsured, millions more under-insured, with the costs of health delivery continuing to skyrocket.
CHARLESTON'S CAMC CEO EXCEEDS $1.2 MILLION
The insurance industry, healthcare providers and the government have continued to ignore an "elephant in the living room" problem for years, relying on a high-priced cobbled system with nearly all proclaiming they are not making money.
CAMC's CEO David Ramsey is compensated more than $1.2 million dollars in salary and benefits.
CAMC's justification, as reported in the December 7, 2004, issue of the Gazette, is that Mr. Ramsey's salary is consistent with salaries for CEOs of similar medical centers, such as Johns Hopkins and Baylor University Medical Center.
CAMC has justified this amount by emphasizing that Ramsey's compensation is strongly tied to the profitability of the hospital. But CAMC is supposed to be a nonprofit community hospital.
Another interesting comparison involves the foundations established to support Charleston's medical centers.
The CAMC Foundation has administrative expenses of 26.1 percent and fundraising expenses of 11.5 percent. The bottom line is that only 62.3 percent of each dollar raised goes to program expenses.
This earned the CAMC Foundation a one star rating from Charity Navigator, a leading rating service for nonprofits. By comparison, the foundations for Johns Hopkins and Baylor both received the highest possible four-star rating.
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