Part of the argument against the war in Iraq is that it is spending money that would be better put to use domestically. Many Americans are taken aback that the Bush Administration would commit half a trillion dollars to an unprovoked and "preemptive" war, which evidently it had already been contemplating prior to 9/11, while resisting even the token expansion of social programs at home.
The latest debate over the expansion of the S-CHIP program is yet another example of this mean-spirited and misguided set of policy priorities. What is surprising is that the Bush Administration, and a majority of the Republicans in Congress, would be willing to oppose expanded health care for children as a wasteful use of taxpayer money – and actually seem to be getting away with it.
Not surprisingly, our own Congressman, Rodney Frelighuysen, has taken up all of the Administration’s disingenuous arguments and deceptive statistics, to suggest that many of the families that would be getting the money don’t really need it, and are already covered by private insurance.
But the facts – as documented (amongst other places) at FactCheck.org – are otherwise.
[President Bush] said it "would result" in covering children in families with incomes up to $83,000 per year, which isn’t true. The Urban Institute estimated that 70 percent of children who would gain coverage are in families earning half that amount, and the bill contains no requirement for setting income eligibility caps any higher than what’s in the current law. (The compromise bill that was released a few days after Bush’s press conference does rescind an administration effort to block New York state from increasing its eligibility cap to that level.)
He also said the program was "meant to help poor children," when in fact Congress stated that it was meant to expand insurance coverage beyond the poor and to cover millions of "low-income" children who were well above the poverty line. Under current law most states cover children at twice or even three times the official poverty level.
The president also says Congress’ expansion is a step toward government-run health care for all. It’s true that some children and families with private insurance are expected to shift to the government program. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that such a shift is relatively low considering the number of uninsured these bills would reach.
And so what if it were a step toward "government-run health care for all"? This is something that all other developed countries already have, something that would be good for business, and something that could significantly improve the longevity, productivity, and quality of life of the American people.
Universal health care is also something that all major Democratic candidates have promised to do if elected, and it may be that this time they are serious. Republicans should embrace this as well, instead of worrying about "socialized medicine" (which might mean they have to wait in line for optional procedures, instead of being able to "crowd out" the basic needs of low-income children with their bucks and their comfortable health plans), especially if they want to ensure that benefits go to those who can least afford them. They complain that some children will abandon existing private insurance in order to go on the government plan, and they call this "crowd-out," as if it were some further inequity; but nothing could be further from the truth.
As Jonathan Cohn writes in The New Republic (Sept. 8, 2007),
There is one way to avoid crowd-out altogether – one solution in which taxpayer dollars would theoretically subsidize only those people who needed assistance, so that everybody would pay what they could for health insurance but not more. The government could simply require that all Americans buy into one common insurance program, adjusting each person’s contribution by income, so that those Americans with more money helped cover the cost of health insurance for those with less.
Does this elegant solution have a name? Why, yes it does. It’s called universal health care. I’m all for it. Most conservatives, alas, are not.
Rodney Frelinghuysen is one of those who is not. Like the lock-step chorus of other rightwing voices, from Bush down to Rush Limbaugh, he’s doing his bit to denigrate children’s health care as "excessive spending," and pretending that the Bush proposals "put poor children first." While invariably complaining about tax-and-spend liberals, Republicans have done more in the past six years to bankrupt the nation’s treasury, to redistribute wealth to the upper levels of society, and to guarantee that Americans will be paying off foreign lenders for decades to come. As in most other policy areas, it’s the strategy of the big lie. And that’s been done before in recent history, with absolutely disastrous results.
It’s time for a change. It’s time to speak out against hypocrisy. And it’s time to tell it like it is, rather than letting the right wing get away with redefining the terms of the debate, trying to badger and scare the American people, pretending to want unity and creating the divisiveness between people in the first place.
Jonathan Cloud, October 28, 2007
