The Health 202: Bernie Sanders has a CHIP on his shoulder

By Paige Winfield Cunningham October 17 at 9:09 AM

Excerpts:

“Right now we have a very, very fragile primary health-care system in America, and that primary health-care system is being stretched to its limits,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told me yesterday.

You’d think even amid the raging battles over the Affordable Care Act — as Republicans have sought to dismantle the law through legislating, executive orders and administrative rule changes — that Congress would prioritize funding CHIP and community health centers. After all, the programs enjoy support from even most Republicans because they provide care to the most vulnerable Americans.

“Obviously there’s been a whole lot of discussion about health care with the Republican effort to repeal and replace, with Trump’s effort to try to sabotage,” Sanders said. “But what is not being discussed is we have a community health center program which now provides health care to some 27 million people all over this county.”

Sanders was a key Democrat who pushed for massively scaling up funding for community health centers as part of the ACA. A trust fund set up by the law provides the centers with 70 percent of their federal funding. The idea was that these centers would need more capacity as more low-income Americans became insured under the 2010 health-care law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2017/10/17/the-health-202-bernie-sanders-has-a-chip-on-his-shoulder/59e524cb30fb041a74e75db7/