The state has now joined the rest of the country and has become the last one to offer low income kids a program.
Arizona has now become the fiftieth state to offer a children’s insurance plan to low-income kids, after the plan’s backers pushed it through the Legislature and landed it on the desk of Governor Doug Ducey (R), who signed it right away.
The program will be known as KidsCare and will be the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program version for Arizonians.
In Arizona, the children’s insurance plan has been sitting in a frozen state since the same year that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was first passed. In 2010, KidsCare was shut down as a result of the budget faced by the state. Now, it has been brought back to life and it is estimated that there will be 30,000 kids who live in low-income families who will be benefiting from it. These kids are among those who are a part of families that earn between 138 and 200 percent of the federal poverty line. These kids will have coverage at no cost to their families until at least 2017.
The effort to bring back the children’s health insurance plan was controversial but Governor Ducey promised to sign.
As promised, Governor Ducey signed the health insurance bill right away. For quite some time, he had not been committed to this legislation, even though he had been facing a growing amount of pressure from many other Republicans. Opponents to the Republicans had argued that if the program was to be restored, it would risk encouraging low-income families to build a dependency on this type of plan.
Their argument was that the ACA was designed to provide those families with coverage; that it was meant to provide assistance to people whose incomes were too great to make them eligible for Medicaid but still low enough that purchasing subsidized coverage would not be affordable. Opponents rejected the argument made by supporters that claimed that the federal government is covering the entire cost, underscoring the sizeable federal deficit.
When all was said and done, the supporters of the children’s insurance plan employed procedural maneuvers to ensure that it would pass and were successful in doing so.
