AUGUSTA – There were roughly 21,000 children in Maine without health insurance in 2006.

The state is at risk of losing federal funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, so state Sen. Joe Brannigan, D-Portland, has proposed a resolution stressing its necessity to the U.S. Congress.

“We hope that the federal government helps us,” House Speaker Rep. Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, said in a meeting with reporters Wednesday.

The program gives subsidized health insurance to children in families not eligible for Medicaid.

The number of uninsured children dropped 4 percent between 1997 and 2005, but it is running out of money, according to an article in USA Today published March 9.

The federal government needs to raise $5 billion annually. If not, 35 states could face shortfalls by 2012, and 1.5 million children nationwide could lose coverage, the article states.

Now, it is about $745 million short.

U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is an advocate for the program, seeing it as a predecessor to universal coverage and wanting to spend another $60 billion on it over five years to include another 6 million children.

Thirteen states – including Maine – have already used up most of the funds allocated in the program, Brannigan writes in his resolution, “due in part to the great need for these funds and also to the inadequate formula by which money is apportioned.”

According to a statement, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, has joined 17 other U.S. lawmakers in a push for funding. “More than 14,000 low-income children now receive health insurance through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in Maine alone, and more than four million nationally. The success of SCHIP is indisputable,” Snowe said, as quoted in the release. “The effectiveness and continued growth of this program has increased both its importance and its need.

“The budget shortfall for this fiscal year could leave more than 600,000 children without coverage, and that is simply unacceptable. We cannot afford to lose ground on the progress that has been made and must take action to ensure states have the funding they need to not only maintain coverage, but continue to increase the number of eligible people enrolled.”

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