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 The new guidelines disclosed last week were criticized by Democratic lawmakers as well as by some governors from both political parties.
Under the guidelines, many children would have to be uninsured for at least one year before they could enroll in the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
The one-year wait applies to a dozen states that let middle-income families enroll in SCHIP, specifically those families with incomes at or above 250 percent of the federal poverty level
-- $43,925 for a family of three. Another half-dozen states were looking to join that list, prompting the administration's actions, health officials said.
"We believe SCHIP was intended to be for low-income children," Leavitt told reporters.
Leavitt spoke publicly about the new guidelines for the first time on Thursday. He had recently returned from a trip to Africa.
The administration is in a high-stakes battle with Congress about the future of the children's health program. Both chambers of Congress have voted to greatly increase spending on children's insurance, but the president had promised to veto those bills in their current form.
Under the program, the federal government and the states subsidize the cost of health coverage for more than 6 million people. The program is designed to help those families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance.
The administration will allow for an exception to the one-year wait. If at least 95 percent of the eligible population is already enrolled in public health coverage, then states could relax that waiting period.
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 However, state officials complain that no state can meet that standard, thus essentially capping the program's reach to a level they consider to be inadequate.
Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Eliot Spitzer of New York responded to the new policy by telling Leavitt this week that he should withdraw it.
"The (administration) is proposing new rules that will set Medicaid and state programs back 40 years," the two governors said in a letter.
But Leavitt said it shouldn't be surprising that states would support getting the federal government to bear the brunt of expanded health coverage and then call it progress.
State officials said the administration has failed to take into consideration that the cost of living is much higher in several states that have expanded children's programs. The expansions are helping families struggling to make ends meet, even if those families' earnings would be considered middle class in other states.
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On the Net:
SCHIP
letter to health officials
[To download Adobe Acrobat Reader for
the PDF file, click
here.]
[Associated Press; by Kevin
Freking]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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