Instead of moving the State Children’s Health Insurance Program closer to becoming an entitlement, increasing the fiscal burden on the states and taxpayers and crowding out existing private coverage for working families, policymakers should establish a responsible system of program financing, set rational eligibility rules, broaden flexibility in health benefit design, and promote private coverage alternatives.

Congress should heed the trustees’ funding warning and adopt the Medicare reforms in the President’s most recent budget proposal.

For the past six years, the health sector has been introducing patient choice and competition into a system that had been largely dominated by top-down, centralized management. Incentives work, and competition works. We need to engage the power of consumers to make our health sector more efficient, more responsive to consumer needs, and more affordable.