Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama today signed into law legislation U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman helped write to ensure that more New Mexicans could have access to health care.

Congress sent the president legislation that reauthorizes the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) -- the state/federal health care initiative crated in 1997 that covers millions of children and others who do not qualify for Medicaid but whose families cannot afford health insurance.  Under the bill, an additional 3.9 million uninsured American children would be covered by SCHIP.

Overall the measure sets aside $32.3 billion over the next four and a half years to ensure that 13 million American children will either maintain health care coverage or receive it for the first time. As a member of Senate Finance Committee, Bingaman worked extensively on the bill and had several provisions included in the measure to specifically address New Mexico's needs.  

As a result of this legislation, New Mexico would stand to receive $196 million for SCHIP this year, which represents a 277 percent increase over the state current SCHIP allotment -- the fourth largest percentage increase of any state. With this funding, tens-of-thousands of additional New Mexico children -- and some adults -- would have access to health care for the first time. 

"Nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance. Far too many of them are children," Bingaman said. "This new law extends health care coverage to nearly 4 million children, thousands of whom live in New Mexico. This is a great bill for the children of our state." 

At Bingaman's urging, the measure corrects an inequity in the law that has prevented New Mexico from covering a certain category of low-income New Mexico children, and required the state to return more than $180 million to the federal government since 1998. Bingaman was able to ensure that category of children could be covered. 

He was also able to secure significant improvements in a federal law that made it very difficult for New Mexicans to prove that they were American citizens and, therefore, eligible for SCHIP. Thousands of U.S. citizen children in New Mexico and throughout the country have inappropriately lost coverage because of this requirement. The legislation now creates a system by which states can verify Social Security numbers to confirm citizenship. It also allows official tribal documents to be used to be used as proof. 

The bill also creates an initiative that Bingaman pushed for many years, which would allow states to automatically enroll children in SCHIP if they have already been deemed eligible for another public program, such as the National School Lunch Program or the Food Stamp Program, with comparable income guidelines. He was also successful in adding an amendment that makes additional improvements to ensure that this "auto enrollment" provision is as streamlined as possible.

"If our goal is to truly reach out to the millions of young Americans who lack health care, it doesn't make sense to place bureaucratic hurdles in the way of enrollment. I am very pleased to have added provisions to the law that dramatically simplify the enrollment process," Bingaman said.

The bill contains a long-time championed Bingaman provision to mandate dental coverage for children receiving SCHIP benefits as well as a "wrap" provisions he co-sponsored during the mark-up to allow children with private coverage who don't receive dental benefits to receive such benefits through SCHIP. Currently, SCHIP does not cover dental care.

"There is no excuse for children in our country living with pain caused by lack of dental care. Adding dental benefits to SCHIP has been a goal of mine for a decade and I'm very glad to have included it in this bill," Bingaman said. 

The law also does the following:

• Ensures that New Mexico can continue to provide coverage through SCHIP to parents of enrolled children, and other low-income adults.
• Gives incentive bonus payments to do outreach and enrollment of young people into Medicaid, and significantly increases outreach to Native American communities.
• Gives community health workers and promatoras access to funding for outreach and enrollment in Medicaid and SCHIP
• Ensures that children enrolled in SCHIP have access to robust mental health benefits.