BullSCHIP!

Greetings from the Left Coast! This is my second blog entry today, but, dang it, there's just so much going on that demands attention! This entry returns to the subject of why I just can't imagine myself voting for a Democrat.

Today, Congress failed to override President Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill. The Democrats are, as you might expect, accusing Bush and the Republicans who stood with him of heartlessly denying health care to millions of poor children. Here's a representative sample:

From the L.A. Times: "President Bush's bullheaded insistence on sabotaging reauthorization of the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, better known as SCHIP, will hurt the very people -- poor and middle-class Americans -- he claims he wants to protect." The Times goes on to refer to the Democrats' "relatively modest plans to increase funding..."

MSNBC ran the story on their Web site accompanied by a picture of Nancy Pelosi and a 2-year-old from Tampa, FL, who "was born with a serious heart condition and relies on...(SCHIP) for her health coverage." The implication is clear: those mean Republicans, led by the evil President Bush, want to deny poor Bethany access to health care for her heart condition.

Harry Reid has emphatically stated that he will not compromise with the administration on the issue. Pelosi promises she will keep working to find the votes needed to override the veto. Her words: "This isn't even an issue anymore...it's a value."

Singer/Songwriter Paul Simon called the decision "heartless." (Note to Paul: Love your music, but it doesn't automatically qualify you to set national fiscal policy. Go record another album, will you please?)

I'm sure you'll continue to hear plenty from radio, TV, and your local newspaper about what a terrible thing Bush and the Republicans did.

Here's the truth:

As the L.A. Times states, SCHIP stands for "State Children's Health Insurance Program." Under the program, the Federal Government gives money to the states (and let me again remind you that the only money they have to give away is ours - yours and mine) so the states can use it to provide health insurance coverage for children of families who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to pay for private health insurance.

In 2006, federal funding of the SCHIP program totaled roughly $5.5 Billion. President Bush did not oppose renewing SCHIP funding. In fact, he asked Congress to increase the funding by roughly $1 Billion per year. Did you get that? The President was willing to sign a bill that would have increased SCHIP funding by around 20%. But that wasn't good enough for Congress. Congress wanted to double the funding. (That's a "relatively modest" increase to the L.A. Times.)

As things stand today, families who earn up to roughly $41,000 per year, which is twice the federally-defined "poverty level," can qualify for SCHIP subsidized health insurance coverage. The Democrats' plan would have increased that ceiling to three times the poverty level. That's $61,950 per year for a family of four. New Jersey would have been allowed to cover families with incomes of up to $72,275 for a family of four. New York was seeking a waiver that would have allowed them to cover families with incomes up to $82,600 for a family of four. (Hmmm...isn't there a Senator from New York who is an avid proponent of federally funded universal health care? And isn't she running for President? Ya think she'll be spinning this as a campaign issue?)

Now, I don't know about your neighborhood, but most of the people I know don't consider families who make $61,950 per year to be particularly "needy." So I'm not sure why you and I should be expected to subsidize their health insurance premiums. In point of fact, the Congressional Budget Office itself estimated that, had the bill passed, roughly two million people would have dropped private health insurance to go on publicly-funded insurance.

Hey, I'd love to have someone else pay my health insurance premiums, too. I'm a partner in a rather small business, and it's danged expensive, given the number of employees we have, for the business to pay those premiums. But I don't think it's right to ask you to pay my health insurance premiums. If you don't agree with that, heck, just send your check directly to me and I'll make sure that 100% of it goes toward my health insurance coverage - there won't be anything wasted on adminstrative overhead! Any takers? No? Hmmmm.

Well, how about this: tomorrow evening, just canvass the neighbors on your block. Knock on their doors, and explain that in the spirit of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, you're asking all of them to chip in to pay your health insurance premiums for you. Let me know how that goes, will you?

So keep all this in mind as you hear the Democrats, and their willing accomplices in the media, beating the drums about how the President vetoed coverage for all these millions of poor children and what a terrible thing it was. The fact is that he wanted the coverage renewed. He even wanted the coverage increased by about 20% per year. He didn't agree that it should be doubled. And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.

Some time ago, Scott Adams made the very astute observation in his "Dilbert Blog" that people on both extremes of a given issue tend to frame their arguments by misrepresenting the other side's position, then attacking the misrepresentation. He's correct in that both the extreme left and the extreme right tend to do that. It seems to me, though, that it's standard operating procedure for the Democrat party...and the biggest problem is that when they do it, the story is picked up and amplified by the media and they harp on it, and harp on it, and harp on it, until it becomes the conventional wisdom.

I'll try to be nice here and just say that the Democrats' arguments strike me as, shall we say, disingenuous. That sounds better than me saying that they're a bunch of lying S.O.B.s. Either way, I'm not voting for them. Not now, not ever.

Thanks for listening.