Call for health care to air in Maryland

Friday, Oct. 26, 2007

Lawmakers will consider the bill during a special session beginning Monday aimed at resolving the state’s $1.7 budget deficit.

The ad, unveiled Monday in Baltimore, will air on about a dozen stations across Maryland for the next week.

It features Bonnie Frost, whose son, Graeme, found himself at the center of the national debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan after the 12-year-old delivered the Democratic response to President George W. Bush’s Saturday radio address last month.

‘‘Our health care system ...,” the ad’s narrator says, followed by the sound of a train crash, ‘‘is a train wreck. We’re always at risk that we might lose health insurance coverage or it might become completely unaffordable, as it is for Bonnie Frost of Baltimore.”

‘‘Both my husband and I work hard to provide for our children,” Frost says in the ad. ‘‘But our jobs don’t provide health insurance. If, God forbid, something happened to one of us, we could lose everything.”

The narrator goes on to say that the bill will ‘‘insure more than a hundred thousand, help small businesses make health care more affordable and reduce smoking, especially among kids, by doubling the cigarette tax.”

‘‘But the Healthy Maryland Initiative won’t gather enough steam to pass the legislature without your help,” the narrator says.

The ad then gives a telephone number to call state Senate offices and ends with the kicker: ‘‘Get on board the Healthy Maryland Initiative today!” and a train whistle.

The tagline tells listeners that the message is from the Healthy Maryland Initiative Coalition. The group, which comprises 675 faith, labor, business and community groups, spent $50,000 to buy air time on such stations as WBAL in Baltimore and WTOP in Washington, said Vincent DeMarco, executive director of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative.

The bill being proposed is similar to one that the House of Delegates passed during the 2007 session that would have expanded Medicaid coverage to 200,000 of the roughly 800,000 uninsured Marylanders. The bill died in the Senate, which refused to take up any bills involving new spending until the state closed the budget gap.

‘‘There’s a growing consensus about health care expansion,” DeMarco said. ‘‘We’re taking nothing for granted and our coalition is working very hard to make it happen.”

The bill would increase Medicaid eligibility to individuals with incomes at 116 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, or $11,844 a year.

The state now covers people earning up to 42 percent of the federal guideline, or $4,288 a year, and children living in families with incomes up to 300 percent of the poverty guideline, or $61,950 a year.

It would also include a $30 million subsidy to help small businesses provide health care benefits, including $20 million for businesses with from two to nine low-income employees and no health benefits.

It would cost $250 million by fiscal 2012, relying for the first year in part on dedicating a doubling of the tobacco tax to $2 per pack of cigarettes.

Health care advocates say covering uninsured people costs those with insurance $300 per person and $1,000 per family each year.

‘‘Let’s expand health care for the uninsured and save all of us from paying unnecessary costs,” DeMarco said.

The Frost family gained national attention after Graeme’s radio appearance in support of SCHIP, which is designed to provide health coverage for children whose families make too much to receive Medicaid coverage but not enough to afford insurance. The program provided coverage for Graeme and his sister, Gemma, when they suffered head injuries in a car crash.

Bush (R) vetoed a bill passed by Congress that would have added $35 billion to the SCHIP program over the next five years.

An attempt in the House last week to override the veto failed.

E-mail Sean R. Sedam at ssedam@gazette.net.