EDITORIAL
Families of severely disabled deserve help

By most accounts, this nation's Medicaid program is underfunded. State administrators struggle to keep up with the programs and benefits guaranteed under Medicaid while costs rise and federal support stagnates.

So arguing for yet another expansion of Medicaid might appear to be an uphill battle.

But there is one proposal, sponsored primarily by Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, and Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican, that seems to make absolute sense.

Their bill, which has already passed the Senate, is called the Dylan Lee James Family Opportunity Act. It's a modest effort to allow families to receive Medicaid health coverage for seriously disabled children without giving up their jobs or incomes.

There is a ceiling on family income for families who apply for Medicaid health insurance for their disabled children.

In the case of Dylan, who died in 2000 with a severe heart defect and Down syndrome, his family found itself cut off from Medicaid benefits months before his death because his father received a raise that put the family over the limit for aid.

In many families, the presence of the ceiling has meant that parents turn down jobs, raises or other economic opportunities just to preserve their Medicaid health benefits.

This is counterproductive. The money lost to individual families means less is available to support other members of the family as well as the disabled child.

Inevitably, the costs the family cannot cover will be shifted to someone else so there is no true savings.

What Kennedy and Grassley want is to preserve benefits for severely disabled children without consideration of family income.

The cost of the proposal is $7 billion over the next nine years, a not inconsiderable sum. Perhaps some modest sliding scale of co-payments could be developed as family income rises.

But to cut families off cold is no solution.

It shifts the burden from the many to the few, hardly a sensible choice.