Friday, August 03, 2007

 

Bush's threat to veto the SCHIP reauthorization bill

For more details on the past history of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, refer to this article in the Boston Herald. A large bipartisan bloc in Congress (both the House and Senate) want to enlarge the program to include children not now covered but whose parents still are not wealthy enough to pay for complete childhood medical care without having to worry occasionally about paying for it. Mr. Bush threatens to veto the bill if it includes money to add children to the program who are not already in it. His threat reveals the following:

  1. He is a determined ideologue who would rather placate the extreme "small government" wing of the Republican Party than the more moderate majority of Republicans and Independents, to say nothing of Democrats. His guiding philosopher in this endeavor is Grover Norquist, not Jesus Christ.
  2. He shows how hollow the slogan "compassionate conservative" is. Telling children of lower middle class parents that they can have all the health care their parents are able and willing to pay for is certainly "conservative." It is not compassionate, at least not toward the parents and children who are affected.
  3. He argues that enlarging the SCHIP program is a step toward a publicly funded universal health care system and must be stopped because it leads to socialism. (Horrors!)
  4. He has compassion for the plight of the poor tobacco companies whose products would be subjected to additional taxation to pay for the additional children.
  5. He has compassion for the HMO's and insurance companies who might lose clients if the SCHIP program is enlarged. Parents might abandon their own unsatisfactory HMO or health insurance plan and enrol instead in SCHIP.

There is a lesson for us who voted hopefully for Democrats last year. Even with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, we are not going to see any progress toward providing access to good health care to those who don't already have it as long as George W. Bush is President.

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