The General Assembly’s chronic ailments — an addiction to gambling (expansions); procrastination; and obesity (the 250-member body is the second-largest in the country) — have been making a mess of Pennsylvania’s finances for years.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that another nasty habit — playing politics with anything and everything — reared its ugly head earlier this year.

That’s where we find the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federally-subsidized program that covers children whose parents’ income is too high to qualify for Medicaid but too low to pay for their own insurance. Some children are covered for free, while some parents are required to pay premiums on a sliding scale.

CHIP covers about 9 million children nationwide, and more than 176,000 in Pennsylvania. But neither that nor the fact that the program has been a bipartisan darling since it was created in 1997 were enough to save it from Congressional inaction.

Earlier this year the program got caught in a political tug of war in Washington, D.C., when Republicans tied its reauthorization to their efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.

We all know how that went. But CHIP’s reauthorization is still uncertain. Earlier this month the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to fund the program for the next five years, but the legislation hasn’t yet received a vote in the Senate.

That means millions of children across the country continue to be in danger of losing vital health coverage while our elected officials either sat on their hands or tried to turn the reauthorization of CHIP to their own political advantage.

None of that is the doing of Pennsylvania lawmakers. But state legislators are guilty of playing politics with CHIP too.

Several weeks ago the state Senate Banking and Insurance Committee, which was reviewing the state’s reauthorization of CHIP, added an amendment to the bill that would have prohibited children in the program from receiving coverage for sex or gender reassignment surgery. The amendment was authored by state Sen. Don White, R-41st, who represents a portion of Butler County.

White’s amendment made a routine reauthorization bill into a controversial measure, a situation that wasn’t diffused until Monday, when the state House unanimously approved a version of the bill that did not include White’s amendment.

That’s undeniably the correct call. There is certainly a debate to be had over whether taxpayer money should be used to subsidize gender reassignment surgery — and another one about the age at which such an irreversible procedure becomes appropriate.

But tying those debates to the reauthorization of a vital health insurance program for hundreds of thousands of children is inappropriate in the extreme.

This “clean” reauthorization of CHIP by the state is just what the doctor ordered.