Sandwiched between the political debacle of President Bill Clinton's broad-based health reform efforts in the early 1990s and President Barack Obama's successful Affordable Care Act in 2010 were the incremental and successful efforts to extend health insurance coverage to children via the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Passed as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, SCHIP was everything that Clinton's Health Security Act was not — it provided grants for private market insurance, it created no new entitlements, it directly helped working-class families yet asked nothing from employers, it provided states with policy and administrative options, its costs were controlled and predictable, and, most importantly, it was bipartisan and enjoyed broad-based political support (Oberlander and Lyons 2009). In Insuring Children's Health: Contentious Politics and Public Policy, Alice Sardell retraces the historical roots of SCHIP, analyzes how policy makers engaged in substantive policy and situational political...

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