By Martha Heberlein

The current health reform proposals have so many moving parts it’s been hard at times to parse out where children will land. Thankfully, Jenny Kenney and Allison Cook at the Urban Institute have provided us with some guidance.

Using 2007 coverage numbers, they examine both the House and Senate bills to determine where current Medicaid and CHIP kids will end up.

[A quick refresher: in the House bill, Medicaid is expanded to 150% of the FPL and CHIP is discontinued; in the Senate bill, Medicaid is expanded to 133% of the FPL and CHIP is maintained (although with no additional funding after 2013).]

If the policies were implemented in 2007, here’s what the transition would look like for children currently enrolled in separate CHIP programs (the authors suggest that adjusting forward to 2014, the numbers would be about 2.5 times higher):

A big caveat here – because the Senate bill does not currently provide funding for CHIP, the 2.3 million children who would have retained CHIP coverage would instead go into the Exchange. However, there are some efforts currently underway to provide funding for CHIP, at least on a transitional basis.

Health reform has a lot of moving parts and a lot of moving people. It is vital that a thoughtful and well-coordinated plan is devised to enroll and retain children in coverage; otherwise, it is quite possible that some children will fall through the cracks, possibly ending up uninsured. And those CHIP kids, wherever they land, it will be important that they get comparable coverage, both in terms of cost sharing and benefits to what they get now.