The Salt Lake Tribune
December 1, 2011
The police department doesn’t make you prove that your taxes are paid before they respond to your alarm. The fire department won’t expect you to enter your PIN code after you call 911.
So why should Utah’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program throw unnecessarily high barriers in front of the families the programs were created to serve?
Yes, Medicaid and CHIP are meant for low-income households. To fulfill their mission, and to have any hopeof having enough money to go around, managers of those programs must verify that the people on their rolls really meet the standards. Anything that is free or very inexpensive, especially a product as chillingly high-priced as health insurance, will attract freeloaders if there is no barrier at all to entry.
