Loading ...« Gubenatorial TV commercials | Home | Tithe to Climate Change: Dems want to increase gas tax »
Extend SCHIP program without spending billions to expand it
By sage of monticello | September 27, 2007
An article published in USA Today, written by Mike Leavitt:
We all want to see every American insured, and President Bush has proposed a plan to see that everyone is. Congress, instead, is pushing a massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that grows government without helping nearly as many children.
The president’s plan, announced last January, would fix our discriminatory tax policy so that every American family received a $15,000 tax break for purchasing health insurance. If Congress acted on the president’s plan, nearly 20 million more Americans would have health insurance, according to the independent Lewin Group.
In contrast, Democrats in Congress would more than double government spending on SCHIP and extend the program to families earning as much as $83,000 a year. But their plan would add fewer than 3 million children to SCHIP, and many of the newly eligible children already have private insurance. So instead of insuring nearly 20 million more Americans privately, Congress would spend billions of dollars to move middle-income Americans off private insurance and onto public assistance.
The Democrats’ plan has other problems. It would fund SCHIP’s expansion with a gimmick that hides its true cost. It would allocate billions of dollars more than is needed to cover eligible kids. And it would allow states to continue diverting SCHIP money from children to adults. This is a boon for the states but costs the federal government more.
Ideology is really behind the Democrats’ plan. They trust government more than the free choices of American consumers. Some in Congress want the federal government to pay for everyone’s health care, and expanding SCHIP is a step in that direction.
SCHIP is part of the fix for low-income children, and Congress should put politics aside and send the president a clean, temporary extension of the current program. Expanding SCHIP is not the only way or the best way to insure the uninsured. The president’s plan is better. It would benefit many more Americans. It would focus SCHIP on the children who need help most. And it would move us more sensibly toward our common goal of every American insured.
Mike Leavitt is secretary of Health and Human Services.
Topics: health care, socialism, democrats, socialized health care, SCHIP, health care policy |
September 28th, 2007 at 12:53 am
“We all want to see every American insured”
Who is this we he speaks of? If we insured everybody, even the high risks, wouldn’t that be defeating the purpose of insurance?