A Review of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (Chipra) and its Implementation in Louisiana, USA

Abstract

The study reviews the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) and its implementation in Louisiana, USA. The Act was enacted at the Federal level to assist the various States to provide health care coverage to the eligible children only, through either Medicaid or the CHIP programs. The CHIPRA through the CHIP was managed by states, according to the federal requirements, set rules and measures. At the same time, the CHIP program through the CHIPRA was both financed by the various states and the federal government to ensure a healthy growth among America’s children. The Act (CHIPRA) paid little or no consideration to the great number of the non-immigrant and immigrant children in the United States of America, thereby exposing the less disadvantaged immigrants’ and non-immigrant children at the school going age to high risk of infectious diseases whenever there is an outbreak. Meanwhile, from the policy review perspective the Act and its associated programs are likely to be failed in terms of recurrent cost of treating diseases and fighting eradication in the near future. Perhaps, this is true because it has been observed over the years that the entire non-immigrant and immigrant children of school-going-age population group mingled-up with the native American Children in classrooms, playing grounds and many other recreational centers for fun, which makes it impossible to eradicate any outbreak of infectious diseases. For the purposes of the review of the CHIPRA and CHIP program, the study adopted Chi-Square analytical techniques, and also utilizes primary sources of data to evaluate or review CHIPRA from the perception of the American residents. As a result the study found out that it is very difficult for CHIP to embark on disease eradication among all school going age children (or infants) when an outbreak occurred. Additionally, the study underscored that majority of the respondents were of the view that CHIP through the CHIPRA is seen as a high-cost intensive program-which is also likely to be inefficient in operation based on it purposes of establishment (i.e. disease eradication or controls outbreak among children). Therefore, this current study highly recommends that at the State-level, legislative-bodies, policymakers and governors should re-package the CHIP and also review the CHIPRA to cover all the school going age children at the state-level in order to protect the children from any outbreak of disease for eradication to be possible.

KEYWORDS: Medicaid, Health Insurance, CHIPRA, Equality, CHIP, and Epidemiology

DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/10-2-07

Publication date: February 29^th 2020