President Bush Is Right in Vetoing SCHIP Bill

To President Bush: Yes, PLEASE veto the SCHIP legislation!

For those not fully in the know, SCHIP is the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This is a program designed to provide Federal government assistance (read "pay for") in providing health insurance to children whose family income was below the poverty level and could not afford to buy commercial insurance for the children. In fact, the original legislation called for signing up children whose family income fell below 200% of the poverty level. That number is currently around $41,ooo/yr. Since it's inception, some states have used their funding to sign up children of families with incomes as high as 350% of the poverty level.

SCHIP is up for renewal now, and the (Democratically-controlled) House and Senate are debating differing bills on expanding the programs. Both houses are calling for dramatically increased funding and increased coverage levels nationally to 35o-400% of the poverty level. (That's up to a family income of $92,000 -- among the top 20% of wage earners in the country.) Meanwhile the original programs are not succeeding at their original purpose, as the percentage of eligible children in families below 200% covered by SCHIP is well less than 90%. Leave it to the Congress (and especially the Democrats) to expand a program that isn't even doing what it was supposed to do.

While the Houses of Congress blather about how much more money to pour down the well, President Bush has moved administratively to limit the ability of states to use Federal dollars on any SCHIP coverage to a family making more than 200% of the poverty level until that state can demonstrate that at least 95% of children in the less-than-200% category have some kind of health coverage. Believe it or not, he's actually trying to make a government program do what its enabling legislation says it's supposed to do -- and he's being soundly criticized for it!

President Bush's position is that the SCHIP is supposed to help those who truly need the assistance, and that to expand the program to cover more and more children at ever-higher income levels is just a way to try to surreptitiously expand government healthcare as a back-door to a single payer system. And he's right about this. This is not a new ploy by the Democrats. Recall Al Gore's healthcare "reform" proposal in the 2000 election: Expand Medicaid up and Medicare down (age-wise) until everybody is covered -- a back door to a government-controlled healthcare system.

And lest we forget: Though SCHIP is technically provided through private insurance companies, the program is administered through Medicaid. The private insurers must contract with Medicaid (in each state), abiding by whatever rules Medicaid puts down. It is essentially just an expansion of the Medicaid program. Expanding SCHIP is just another way of implementing Al Gore's misbegotten idea.

If families making $92,000/yr cannot "afford" to own up to their responsibility to provide for the healthcare of their children, then there is something wrong -- with them! They have problems with their priorities, with their budgeting, or with their mental processes. But they don't have a problem with the lack of Big Brother "helping" them.

The house of cards hasn't even completely fallen yet and the communists are trying to take us down the wrong path. The uphill road seems to be steeper than even I imagine.