With his October 3rd veto of the bipartisan SCHIP bill, President Bush has sent a pretty clear message that lower-income families should really fend for themselves when it comes to insuring their children. He’ll say otherwise, but since his speeches on the subject seem to indicate a lack of understanding about the program’s operation, he’s either ignorant (or stupid, but we won’t go there at the moment), or lying and actually does hate poor kids.
Here are a couple examples.
“I believe in private medicine,” Bush told an audience in Lancaster, Penn., on Wednesday morning. “I believe in helping poor people, which was the intent of SCHIP, now being expanded beyond its initial intent. I also believe that the federal government should make it easier for people to afford private insurance. I don’t want the federal government making decisions for doctors and customers.”
First off, SCHIP is a federally-funded STATE program. That’s what the “S” stands for. The government (federal OR state) doesn’t have anything to do with the administration of health care, either… only in funding private insurance. If Bush believes that “the federal government should make it easier for people to afford private insurance”as he stated, then he should be in complete support of SCHIP since that’s exactly what it does. In addition, it does it without any government interference in health care.
The president also complained that the bill would cover too many children who don’t need federal help. “This program expands coverage, federal coverage, up to families earning $83,000 a year. That doesn’t sound poor to me,” the president told the Lancaster audience.
That statement shows that either he doesn’t understand the program or he’s trying to use scare tactics to try to make it sound bad. The income cap for SCHIP eligibility is three times the federal poverty level (about $60k/yr.) for a family of four. New York had WANTED to increase it to four times the federal poverty level (about $82,600… Bush’s $83k figure), but the plan was rejected. So the cap remains at $60,000 per year for a family of four.
Moreover, the plan the president wanted to pass would have fallen short of maintaining the program at its current level for the next 5 years. The vetoed bipartisan bill was to expand the program to cover about ten million kids. So not only did he veto the expansion of the program, but he seemingly wanted to shut it down in its current version… or pass it off on the next president to deal with.
From what I understand, the expansion was to be covered by an increase in the cigarette tax from $0.60 to $1.00. I don’t smoke anymore, so I’m cool with that.
Here’s a link to a story about the veto, which is also the source of my quotes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14962685