President Bush easily outflanks the bumbling Congress over SCHIP
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By Doug Gibson
Commentary
The debate over SCHIP, or the State Children's Health Insurance Program, between Congress and President Bush is about over. Once again, President Bush has easily defeated a bumbling, stumbling Democratic Congress prone to using children as political props and hysterical rhetoric. Unless there is an unforeseen shift, by today Bush's veto is expected to be easily sustained.
SCHIP is a good deal for kids with parents who work, earn well more than the federal poverty limit but can't afford private insurance. It was started by the GOP Congress in the 1990s.
When SCHIP came up for renewal this year, Democrats dramatically inflated the qualification criteria. They want to include kids in families earning as much as $62,000. President Bush objected, saying $41,000 a year for a family of four, or about 200 percent of the poverty level, is a better solution. Bush also objected to the Democrats' claims that the increase could be funded by adding more taxes to tobacco.
Even if that tax could pay for the increase -- it can't -- the SCHIP increase would be borne in part on the backs of lower-income Americans, who are more prone to smoking. We would eventually need more taxes to keep the increase in SCHIP funding going.
The president also suggested that expanding SCHIP eligibility to $60,000-plus was a ploy by liberals to make government health care more of a temptation to the middle class. Democrats scoffed at that assertion, but it has historical backing. Prior to the Clinton administration, Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg, writing in the American Prospect, argued that to achieve long-term dominance, Democrats needed to draw the middle class into more government programs that provide them a sense of security.
Hillary Clinton's effort to overhaul health care access in 1993-94 failed. But the Greenberg idea has remained fertile in Democratic and liberal think tanks.
So Bush vetoed the SCHIP expansion. Most media painted it as a huge public relations disaster for the Republicans and President Bush. This coverage was encouraged by the actions of a few Republican senators in office too long, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, who embraced the Democratic Party SCHIP plan.
Democratic Party leaders in Congress -- still politically tone deaf -- started a shrill public relations campaign. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said she was praying for the president to change his mind. Pleading children were exploited as political props by Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid snarled, wondering how Bush could look at himself in the mirror.
There were exceptions. Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson made an eloquent plea to pass the SCHIP bill in the pages of this very newspaper. But those arguments were drowned in the "Let's say Bush and the Republicans don't care about the kids" campaign hatched by Pelosi and Reid.
Still, as late as Tuesday, the conventional wisdom was that SCHIP was a loser issue for Republicans. The CW was wrong. A USA TODAY/Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, agree that SCHIP benefits should not exceed 200 percent of the poverty level. Only 40 percent of Americans believe SCHIP's limit should be $62,000.
Also, 55 percent are with Bush and the Republicans, saying they are concerned that the program may provide incentives for Americans to drop private insurance.
These poll results deflated the SCHIP expansion plans. A clumsy, not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic Congress failed on an issue of great concern to the party's base. President Bush deserves credit for using logic, and the powers of the presidency, to defeat poorly thought out political legislation based on emotion rather than reason.
The president has offered to compromise with the Congress, and it's likely SCHIP will expand past $41,000, but nowhere near the $62,000 supporters wanted. So after all the hyperbole, kids who need health care coverage will get it.
It would be nice to have an honest debate on health care coverage. There are a lot of problems with the insurance industry and the price of drugs.
If these problems continue, we may end up with a single-payer system here. At this point, it appears most Americans don't favor that solution.
What we don't need are politicians -- afraid to admit they want socialized medicine -- trying to gradually place more Americans in that kind of a system through the failed SCHIP expansion scheme and then cynically screaming "it's for the children" at those who oppose them.
Gibson is the Standard-Examiner's assistant editorial page editor. He can be reached at dgibson@standard.net.
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