from the LA Times via the SEMissourian

Except it's for real, and it's in Texas...where? Oh, the old home of Mr. Compassionate Conservative himself. Grover Norquist reads this and has Orgasms...sorry, didn't mean to make you wince.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- This state, which already has the nation's highest proportion of residents without health insurance, is about to acquire a new distinction.

With its legislature on the verge of approving a budget that closes a $9.9 billion deficit without raising taxes, Texas soon will lead the United States in the number of low-income children dropped from publicly financed health insurance.

Destynn Hatcher, who at 19 months old has a list of medical conditions, specialists and prescriptions as long as he is tall, could be one of them.

He was born with a hole in his heart. At 6 weeks, he nearly died from a lung infection. He has battled pulmonary stenosis, pneumonia, apnea, severe dysphagia, pituitary dwarfism and a "failure to thrive." Yet thanks to a federal-state health insurance program for the children of the working poor, which pays for his surgeries, feeding tube, daily growth hormone injections, expensive medical equipment and regular visits to specialists, Destynn recently gained a pound and grew 2 inches.

Far fewer states are cutting CHIP, the widely praised program created by Congress in 1997 that gives states matching funds to insure children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford private coverage.

But in Texas, the health-care ax is falling most heavily on children of the working poor.

The state's new two-year budget will keep about 170,000 Texas children off the CHIP rolls. And the parents of children still eligible for CHIP will face increases in their premiums and co-payments and a dramatic decline in the range of covered benefits.

The legislature ultimately decided to shrink CHIP by making it more difficult for families to qualify. New asset tests, stricter definitions of income, and a 90-day waiting period to join will leave many currently eligible families out of the program.

The new state budget also reduces home-health services for 100,000 low-income elderly and disabled Texans, eliminates temporary catastrophic health coverage for about 10,000 families and denies prenatal care to 8,300 low-income pregnant women per month.

County officials across Texas, who were among the strongest opponents of the cuts, are bracing for the additional costs they will be forced to absorb as children once covered by CHIP begin flooding emergency rooms and public hospitals.

"Every dollar we don't spend in preventive care will later cost us $20 in acute care," said Rick Merrill, president and CEO of Driscoll Children's Hospital. (emphasis added)

But a high-ranking state official, who asked not to be identified, said that given the state's finances, "it's all the more impressive that the outcome was not as drastic as people had feared." The "pain to come in implementing these kinds of changes," the official said, "will depend on how humanely we do it."