Every once in a while, sometimes quietly, good things happen in Dover. Yesterday was one of those days. While some of their colleagues were busy pounding their chests and holding press conferences to launch partisan attacks, Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives worked together to pass a bill that I wrote to expand enrollment in our CHIP program, which provides low-cost health insurance to children whose families are between 100% and 200% of poverty. And funding for the bill is going to be provided by my office, through money that I have saved by running my office better than it had run in the past.

The idea is simple. Delaware’s CHIP program is tragically underenrolled—on any given day, only about 5,000 of the 13,000 eligible kids are enrolled. Federally-funded free and reduced price school lunch programs have a wealth of information about kids who meet the income eligibility requirements for the CHIP program. What this bill does is to set up a system where eligible kids will be identified through their enrollment in the free and reduced price lunch program, and their families will be encouraged to sign their kids up for low-cost health insurance. There are more details, some of them designed to protect family privacy, but that is the essence of it.

It will cost some money to put the apparatus in place to run this new program. That money is coming from my office, even though my office has no formal responsibility for the CHIP program. I decided to step up and provide the funds in order to avoid any excuses for not passing the bill, and I was able to provide the funds because we have managed to reorganize the finances of the Insurance Department in a way that has made more funds available to spend on important programs, without having any impact on Delaware taxpayers.

Is this bill going to solve all of our problems with the CHIP program or health insurance for kids? Heck no. But it is a great start, and an important step. I want to thank all of the sponsors of the bill—again, both Democrats and Republicans—for their help in getting this one done.