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Friday, July 20, 2007
Forward march to Hillarycare? Slow this roll
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
America has a choice on health care. It’s either Sicko. Or the private sector.
The latest round in that conflict advanced this week in the U.S. Senate when the Finance Committee agreed 17-4 to a huge expansion of the federal program that subsidizes health insurance for children and some adults in families with incomes too high for Medicaid. It’s the program that provides about 70 percent of the funding for Georgia’s PeachCare.
Over the last five years, PeachCare’s federal funding source, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, has cost the nation’s taxpayers about $20 billion. The bill that passed committee on Thursday would expand that over the next five years to $60 billion, double what the administration proposed. President Bush promises a veto.
“There is a disconnect between what the American people want and what the House and Senate want,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) Friday. “What the House and Senate want is an incremental movement toward a Washington-run health care system, and this is their next step. If there was ever a doubt in anybody’s mind about what the Left wants to do on health care, it should be completely removed by this bill.”
Supporters of government-sponsored universal health care, having given up on the notion that Americans will suddenly switch, have adopted another strategy. It’s the strategy of incrementalism, the same strategy used to virtually eliminate capital punishment in this country, and the strategy now being employed to make the traditional family just another lifestyle choice for child-rearing. That strategy is to create one more exception and to exaggerate flaws in the system to undermine public confidence in it, while misrepresenting or ignoring inconvenient facts.
On PeachCare, for example, one of the inconvenient facts is that parents who can afford private health insurance drop it in favor of the more generous and less expensive government program. A Congressional Budget Office report in May found that parents of as many as half the children enrolled nationally made the rational dollar choice to switch.
The legislation being debated would include children in families with incomes up to $82,000, said Price, and would make eligible 90 percent of the children now covered by private health insurance. “I don’t believe that the American people desire or want fundamental, personal individual medical choices made by families and patients moved to Washington.”
This is a program that is less than 10 years old and has drawn little analysis at the state level to determine how it’s working and whether it’s serving the intended population.
Even though it’s not an entitlement — federal spending is limited to the sum Congress allocates — it’s following the entitlement pattern. It’s expanded based on anecdote and good intentions, not hard analysis.
The SCHIP program is up for renewal in September. Ideally, the analysis of effectiveness would have come before expansion. But the liberal strategy is to bring the nation along, one group at a time, to Hillarycare. A decade ago the program was created for families with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $34,340 for a family of three. Several states, including Georgia, took advantage of high-revenue years to expand it. The cap here is 235 percent of poverty, or $40,349 for a family of three, with some earnings and expenses subtracted to determine eligibility.
Some states also expanded eligibility to include adults. The Senate bill would gradually move adults without children out of the program, though it would give states the option of covering them through Medicaid.
The single-payer strategy, as demonstrated in Georgia and elsewhere, is to bring more and more individuals into taxpayer-financed programs until the only group left out are non-poor single men. At that point, of course, Hillarycare is here.
“We are ready to renew our commitment to low-income children today,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt after the finance committee vote, “but we cannot agree to a gradual government takeover of health care.”
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