Setting the Record Straight on S-CHIP

As a parent of now-grown children, there perhaps was nothing more terrifying than wondering if they would be able to get health care should I lose my job.

That thankfully never occurred. I had health insurance through my employer and could not be considered to be poor. But it is something that parents have to confront today who also are not poor but whose children are among the 9 million in the U.S. who are uninsured.

That is the rub of – and a central misunderstanding in -- the debate over expanding the popular federally-funded State Childrens' Health-Insurance Program and yet another instance in which the so-called compassionate conservatism of the Bush administration is nothing less than an attack on the beleaguered middle class.

Opponents of expanding S-CHIP tirelessly point out that the program would cover children whose family's incomes put them squarely in the middle class as if that were some budget-busting giveaway – pork for parents, as it were – whereas the reality is far different:

Today in America, not just poor people need a leg up to get access to health care.

This makes President Bush's promised veto of a $35 billion expansion of S-CHIP voted by both Houses of Congress last week by healthy bipartisan margins such a low blow.

The compromise package would expand the $5 billion-a-year program by an average of $7 billion a year over the next five years for total funding of $60 billion for the period. That would be enough to boost the program's enrollment to 10 million, up from 6.6 million, which would reduce the ranks of uninsured children.

The president asserts that expanding S-CHIP would be too expensive, which is silly considering that his Forever War in Iraq sucks up more money in a few weeks than would be earmarked for kids, and putting killing insurgents in Iraq ahead of children at home is, to say the least, misguided.

One leading conservative blogger harrumphed that it would serve "as a Trojan horse for nationalized health insurance . . . (by) forcing out private insurers by pushing government-controlled coverage onto children."

That argument is perhaps even sillier since it isn't written in the Constitution or anywhere else that the very private insurers who have played a leading role in precipitating the crisis in the American health-care system have a right to dictate the rules of the game.

Lost in the debate over expanding S-CHIP is that in August the Bush administration, in a pre-emptive strike of a sort, issued rules that set new hurdles for S-CHIP applicants, including an income ceiling that would mean some children already in the program would become ineligible. The bill passed by Congress would invalidate those rules.

On Monday, New Jersey joined six other states in suing to force the feds continue picking up most of the cost of subsidized health care coverage for children in families of four making about $52,000 to $72,000 a year.

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine said the rules jeopardize coverage for nearly 11,000 New Jersey children already enrolled, as well as children from more middle-income families who qualify but are not yet enrolled.

"That's a fertile area for signing up additional kids," Corzine said of families making between 250 and 350 percent of the federal poverty limit, or between $51,625 and $72,275 for a family of four. "We've worked on low-income families way more than we worked in this area. This is the best thing we can do to try to get to universal insurance.

"S-CHIP, established in 1997, gives states broad discretion to design plans that meet their residents' needs, and the lawsuit notes that New Jersey has gotten federal approval repeatedly since 1999 when Christie Whitman, that bleeding-heart moderate Republican, was governor, to cover families making as much as 350 percent of the poverty limit.

"We see that (program expansion) as a step towards more government-controlled health care," White House press secretary Dana Perino said on Monday. "That is a policy difference that the president has."

The 1997 law that created SCHIP expired on Sunday, and the program is operating under a temporary extension.