In the online journal Health Affairs, there's a study of the number of children who are eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) but aren't being covered. The authors- two economists at a federal health care research agency- found that 62 percent of uninsured children are currently eligible for SCHIP. That's 5.5 million kids, the vast majority of whom live in families whose incomes are below 200 percent of the poverty line and are disproportionately headed by a single parent. And for the fiscal policy folks, there's this interesting twist on the cost of SCHIP: More fundamentally, an unappreciated aspect of crowd-out is that private insurance is itself subsidized through tax exclusions.21 One must be careful to account for this subsidy, along with savings on uncompensated care and other public programs, when considering the cost of expanding SCHIP. In a previous study, we estimated that the true cost of covering a child in SCHIP is only half the apparent budgetary amount when one accounts for offsetting program savings.22 Another factor helping reduce costs is that more than 90 percent of all eligible children above 200 percent of poverty face cost sharing in the form of premiums, copayments for services, or both.23 As you may know, the House-passed version of the SCHIP expansion is estimated to provide coverage for 5 million more children who would otherwise be uninsured, while the House version would cover 4 million more. Via BNA (subscription only).