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By Grace-Marie Turner

Is President Bush a liar who hates children? That’s what many of his critics are asking in the opinion pages of major newspapers across the country. Why else, they say, would he refuse to sign a bill providing health insurance to poor kids?

Specifically, the president has vetoed a bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, designed to provide health coverage to lower-income children. One nationally syndicated columnist went so far as to call Bush’s rationale in vetoing the bill a “pack of flat-out lies.”

This kind of rhetoric is wrong and misleads readers about the facts.

There is no debate over whether to reauthorize the SCHIP program so it can continue to provide insurance to needy children. That’s a given. The debate is about whether children in middle-income families should be added.

The president is absolutely right in insisting that SCHIP focus on its core mission of needy children. When SCHIP was created in 1997, the target population was children whose parents earned too much for them to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance. The president wants the program to focus on children whose families earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In today’s dollars, that’s $41,300 a year.

About two-thirds of the nation’s uninsured children already are eligible for either Medicaid or SCHIP but aren’t enrolled. Raising the income threshold won’t solve this core problem.

The other big problem is that states are using SCHIP dollars to insure adults.

Fourteen states cover adults through SCHIP, and at least six of them are spending more of their SCHIP dollars on adults than on children. For example, 78 percent of SCHIP enrollees in Minnesota are adults, 79 percent in New Mexico and 72 percent in Michigan.

With these statistics in mind, the Bush administration issued a ruling in August requiring states to demonstrate they had enrolled 95 percent of eligible needy children before expanding the program.

Yet the bill that Congress passed, and which the president vetoed, nullifies that ruling and effectively refuses to agree that needy kids should get first preference. Instead, the congressional measure would give $60 billion to the states over five years to enroll millions more “children” — although many of them will, in fact, be adults. Others will be from higher-income families.

New York, for instance, could submit a plan that would add children in families earning up to $83,000 a year to SCHIP. New Jersey could continue to cover kids whose parents make up to $72,000. All the other states would be allowed to cover kids in families with incomes up to $61,000.

Most children in these higher income families, unsurprisingly, are already covered by private insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 77 percent of children in families earning more than twice the poverty line have private health insurance now.

No one doubts that SCHIP is a vitally important program for needy children, and that our nation needs to do a better job of helping working families afford health insurance. But giving the states incentives to add middle-income kids to their SCHIP rolls will prompt families to replace private insurance with taxpayer-provided coverage.

This is completely backward. The goal of SCHIP should be to provide private coverage to uninsured children. If Congress would send the president a bill that does that, he says he would sign it in a minute.

Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit research organization focusing on free-market solutions to health care reform.

READER COMMENTS

You are right Mary, but perhaps you don't know the rest of the story.

1. Tobacco control zealots got the smoking ban passed.
2. Tobacco control zealots promote the use of nonsmoke nicotine delivery devices that give one a larger dose of nicotine than they would be exposed to from second hand smoke in any Bar or Tavern putting the lie to the jusification that health is the reason for the ban.
3, Tobacco products are highly excised taxed and the devices tobacco control zealots promote are zero taxed, Ergo, there scheme to get everyone hooked on those devices reduces the targeted tax revenue to pay for SCHIP.

The loss of tax revenue from bars and taverns are a direct result of the smoking ban that was enacted on the false claims of these zealots that it was justified by health concerns. They,of course, had to advance that falsity because of the huge cash grants they got from the pharmaceutical companies and the multi billion dollar foundations that own $3.6 billion in their stock, that produce non smoke nicotine delivery devices

It's axiomatic; zealots ALWAYS fail, in their frenzy to get their personal preferences and false preconcieved ideas enacted into law, to look down the road to the predictable consequiences of their actions. Soooo, what's that mean?

Well, along with all that, add that loss of tax revenue caused by tobacco control and the smoking ban that will increase by the predicted $30,000,000+ lost tax revenue from casinos when they too have to suffer loss of business come January under the smoking ban.

The picture should be getting clearer now. Yea, that's right, it's you, the majority of nonsmokers who will be tapped. Zealot's actions and your participation with them in that brilliant lack of foresight will cause you nonsmokers, the majority, to dig deeper into your already over taxed pockets to pay for SCHIP.

And I say, it's high damned time the government and the legislators stop thinking of smokers as their personal ATM and tapped you zealots instead.

Beware of what you ask for, you may get it---This time it comes with a vengances that will take you where you most don't want to go. Believe me, pay backs are a bitch, and I'm going to have blind eyes and deaf ears when you start to scream------------- It' not fair! it's unconstitutional,! Your destroying my life and livelihood! Yeah right, its okay when it's someone else right, but now that it will be you, do you really think I care? Hypocrisy has always been disgusting to me but, you know what, if it really is wrong, unfair and destructive to you and yours, my principles and honor would requirer me to fight for you ,even though I am just the filthy, disgusting and despicable low life you call me.

How about after the daddy of the single mom's children ponies up for HIS children, then the taxpayers kick in.

As I recall, the name of that single mom was not "Virgin Mary"

The writer claims that 200% of poverty correlates to an income of $41,300/yr but elsewhere in the Post is a story about a single mom earning $32,000 with two kids who were remove from SCHP coverage in Colorado. So let's keep the facts straight. Also, even if a state submits a plan under the vetoed bill for coverage above what Bush wants the plan must be approved. By whom? Bush of course. Another inconvenient fact left out by the opponents of the bill
JB

Let's put this demonic (sulphur) moron out of his misery. Some where Hitler is smiling. Bush should be court martialed because he is a UCMJ-felon, AWOL deserter, and guilty of illegal separation and discharge. After we are finished with him, toss to him to an international court of law, where he, Powell, Blair, Cheney, Rice, Lott, and DeLay, can all be tried for war crimes (WMD lies, using chemical weapons and Rx drugged troops on unsuspecting Iraqi citizens, Blackwater mercernaries -Nazi-SS, etc.).

Not to mention the fact that Congress (in a PC fashion) chose to fund this with tobacco taxes, which
1) disproportionately hits the lower income folks - of whom between 30-35% smoke
2) is a declining revenue base (ask the the state of Colorado how much of a shortfall they got when the state jumped tobacco taxes - which were to fund non-tobacco related initiatives - as I recall, the state only collected about 60% of what it forecast) - in fact, one representative pointed out, to fully fund this, it would take 22 MILLION NEW smokers - not likely to happen.
3) covering uninsured children is a good thing for the nation as a whole; therefore - shouldn't the nation as a whole pay for it instead of the just 20-25% who smoke?

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