President Bush has apparently unilaterally changed the waiver criteria applicable to the SCHIP program. I'm still not entirely clear on how this works, but if you take a look at the SCHIP factcheck I wrote up a couple of weeks ago, you get a sense for how the waiver process works.

By Bush's fiat now, state programs across the country are going to have to kick people off of SCHIP -- he's basically stripping from the program all of the flexibility that has been critical to its success.

“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

Stan Rosenstein, the Medicaid director in California, said the new policy was “highly restrictive, much more restrictive than what we want to do.”

From the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, the state programs that will be cut if Bush's change is allowed to stand: