Sinking, But Thinking, SCHIP

Edited 11pm; UPDATED 10/16 below

I don't understand lefty attacks on President Bush's recent veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) expansion bill. Initially, the Administration supports CHIP program, and proposed a 20 percent SCHIP funding increase in the 2008 budget; the veto blocked a proposal by Congressional Democrats to relax the upper limit on the tax-funded program so that families earning as much as 400 percent of the poverty limit -- $82,500 per year -- would qualify.

This isn't about a safety net: the vetoed bill neither focused on the needy nor on just children. Rather, contrary to the Archdiocese of Detroit, expanding SCHIP would be another middle-class entitlement; a "free good" that would "crowd-out" and thus undermine the market for private health insurance for the middle class. Upping the SCHIP limit would provide further, unfortunate, impetus to an inefficient "therapeutic imperative."

Yet according to liberal columnists like Paul Krugman, the only explanation for Bush's veto is that Republicans are "evil." We've seen this movie before. . .

And I'm baffled by leftist nut-root and main-stream media (including the WSJ editorial page) complaints about right-of-center bloggers fisking the Democratic poster-family for the law, the Frosts of Maryland. Senate Democrats fired the first shot, as Michelle Malkin describes:

A few weeks ago, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lured two young children to the public spotlight to help him pass a massive expansion of government health insurance. Gemma and Graeme Frost, 9 and 12 years old respectively, were severely injured in a car accident three years ago. Their parents obtained government health care through the non-means-tested Children's Health Insurance Program in Maryland. President Bush's veto doesn't change that -- and there's the rub.

Because liberal lawmakers cannot honestly defend their expansion plans as bona fide aid to the needy, they have surrounded themselves with the Frosts and other kiddie human shields to deflect any tough scrutiny. As they push for an override of the president's veto, scheduled for Oct. 18, the desperate Dems will shamelessly invoke the Absolute Moral Authority kiddie card to attack their critics for "attacking the children."

After 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered the Democrat radio address, which was penned for him by Senate staffers, conservatives on the FreeRepublic.com forum and across the Internet asked the questions the mainstream media wouldn't ask about the family's financial situation. The couple claims a combined annual income of about $45,000. Neither the Democrats nor the Baltimore Sun indicates how they verified that assertion before circulating it.

As Powerline's Paul Mirengoff observes:

once the Democrats hand-picked a kid, it became fair (though not terribly germane) to flesh out the details of his family's circumstances to see how difficult and onerous it would have been for the family to purchase health insurance for its children. This required an analysis of, among other things, how much income the family earns and what its assets are. Undertaking such an analysis hardly constituted an "assault" on Graeme Frost's family.

As it turned out, the Frosts live in a 3,000 square foot well-appointed house which is worth over $250,000; the kids attend private schools; they have three cars; receive rental income from a commercial property; and affordable private insurance is available. And, as noted above, the Frost children qualify for SCHIP today (and under the Bush 08 budget proposal) and so would not be aided by the Dems' proposed coverage expansion.

But that didn't stop progressives from claiming right-wingers were "smearing" children to advance "the politics of hate" or "distorting" facts and "harassing the Frosts" ultimately "sacrificing the daily lives of a couple of injured children." Nonsense, as Rick Moran observes:

The point is simple and worth repeating; not one single righty blogger that I have read has criticized a 12 year old boy. Despite all the hand wringing, wailing, fake outrage, and deliberate obfuscation of the truth, to charge conservatives with the crime of piling on an injured child is outrageously false and, since the left knows it’s not true, a blatant lie.

And it's not as if the left considers child spokesmen beyond challenge: "progressives" attacked a nine year-old President Bush dragged into the Social Security privatization debate.

Conservatives shouldn't let the left define this debate. Health insurance policy goes to the heart of the relationship of the state to citizens and the role of government in poverty reduction. The tie between those two questions is the market, which limits the length of poverty spells and the duration of most insurance coverage gaps. The market pulled more out of poverty than socialist income transfers. Says Rick Moran:

The whole problem with SCHIP and other entitlements is that we have confused “need” and “want” to the point that there is no longer any difference between the two. It is the difference between freedom and capitalism and dependence and socialism. As each incremental increase in government’s ability to make decisions for us becomes law, a corresponding loss of freedom occurs – freedom to make our own decisions about family and our futures. SCHIP does not represent much of a loss as far as our freedom is concerned. Perhaps technically none at all. We simply abrogate responsibility for supplying health care to our loved ones and place the burden on our neighbors.

For the Frosts, and most Americans, health insurance is available, as Investor's Business Daily noted in August:

One of the shocking things in the Census Bureau's report this week on poverty and health care in America is that so many well-to-do people can easily afford health care, but choose to go without it.

The median household income, according to the data released this week, is $48,200. You might be surprised to discover that 38% of all the uninsured — that's almost 18 million people — have incomes higher than $50,000 a year. An astounding 20% of all uninsured have incomes over $75,000. [NOfP note: percentages calculated using Table 6 data] These are people who can afford coverage.

But insurance is effective only if purchased before-hand. The Frosts decided against private health insurance--then suffered a tragic accident. Why should we socialize this particular bad choice? As Mark Steyn says, "Ultimately it's a reductive notion of liberty to say a free-born citizen can choose his own breakfast cereal and DVD rentals and cable package and, in the case of the Frosts, three premium vehicles, but demand the government take responsibility for all the grown-up stuff."

It's not like such government paternalism is free--expanding SCHIP would be expensive and ineffective--to the particular detriment of poorer families. As Captain Ed observes, "Let's leave the Frosts alone and get back to the real policy debate -- and ask ourselves why we're taking $30 billion from poor and working-class Americans to subsidize health care for people better off than they are, for "children" in their twenties, and for people whose choices are not our responsibility." And we shouldn't assume universal coverage is the solution, reminds IBD:

Drilling even deeper, one finds that fully 27% of all the uninsured in the U.S. — that's 12.6 million people — aren't even citizens.

Not coincidentally, the government also estimates that about 12 million illegals now reside in the U.S., though some think tanks put the number as high as 20 million.

Putting the two together, this suggests that — surprise — a major reason for the uninsured "problem" is our failure to enforce our border.

Hillary hasn't yet decided whether to insure undocumented aliens.

Conclusion: Michelle Malkin says the SCHIP expansion issue:

cuts to the core of the supposed differences between the two major political parties:

Who deserves government-subsidized health insurance?

Are Democrats capable of putting down the human shields and answering the question?

They are but subsidized socialism is their response. Yet Americans shouldn't presuppose condescending paternalism can cure, says Bithead:

If in fact the Frosts are emblematic of the type of family the Democrats think are deserving of healthcare paid for with MY money, we as a nation have bigger problems than we’re going to be able to solve by throwing your money and mine at it. We have a problem centering on honesty and responsibility.

We also have a problem with a political party willing to toss aside those concepts. Think about it; Democrats willing to toss aside honesty and responsibility. Does the concept shock you? Me, neither.

Agreed--for many on the left, that's a feature, not a bug.

MORE:

Physician and Congressman Charles W. Boustany Jr., in National Review:

S-CHIP was rightly intended to provide health insurance to kids whose families barely miss qualifying for Medicaid, something everyone agrees is a good idea. However, Washington liberals are attempting to overextend the program, hurting children already on the program and worse yet, hurting children who qualify for S-CHIP but who are not currently enrolled. S-CHIP is for children who need it, not adults and not the middle class.

Created in 1997 by a Republican Congress and President Clinton, S-CHIP was created to help families on the cusp of the Federal poverty line. The program received tremendous bi-partisan support and is a strategic safety-net designed to get children necessary care instead of visits to the emergency room. Through a federal and state partnership, children of families making up to $41,300 receive health insurance, but unfortunately some children are simply not enrolled. . .

I want S-CHIP to focus on registering those kids who currently qualify, before overextending the program to those for whom it was not intended.

MORE & MORE:

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg:

I support renewing S-CHIP to provide health care to children in low-income families, but I also believe we need to ensure that the children’s health program is available for children who need it, and not for adults, people who enter the country illegally, or families who already have private insurance.

The Democratic legislation takes a program originally meant for children of low-income families and expands it to cover some families earning up to $83,000 and illegal immigrants, while moving millions of children from private health insurance to government programs.

In 2006, 118,501 children and 101,919 adults in Michigan received health care from the S-CHIP program. Incredibly, this means that 46 percent of Michigan’s funding allotment intended to give poor children health insurance actually went to cover adults.

The Wall Street Journal further described this problem in its August 9 editorial: “The bill goes so far as to offer increasing ‘bonus payments’ to states as they enroll more people in their SCHIP programs. To grease the way, the bill re-labels children’ as anyone under 25, and ‘low income’ as up to… $82,600 for a family of four.”

It is unfathomable to think that Democrats want to expand a program that currently does not meet the full objective of covering poor children, and expand it to try to insure single adults. I’m not sure what part of “children’s health care” liberals in Congress do not understand.