Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > September > 11
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
On SCHIP, Bush should use veto power
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Demonstrating that life and fight remains, a Bush administration hounded and besieged by a spendthrift Congress, demonstrates that even when surrounded and overwhelmed, there are ways to fight back.
Less than three weeks before the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the federal funding source for PeachCare, is set to expire, neither the House nor the Senate has moved to reconcile wildly expensive legislation passed in August to extend the program another five years. Under existing spending levels, that cost would be $25 billion.
The House would raise that to about $75 billion and the Senate, $60 billion. The president has proposed $30 billion and has promised to veto the higher spending.
After the two higher versions were passed allowing coverage of “children” up to the age of 25, whether they are in this country legally or not, and after New York sought to expand eligibility for families earning as much as $82,000 per year, the administration acted. It imposed new standards requiring states to enroll “at least 95 percent of children in the state below 200 percent of the federal poverty level” before they can expand eligibility. New York would expand eligibility to 400 percent of poverty, highest in the nation. Georgia is at 235 percent.
In effect, states are ordered to fulfill the original promise of programs such as PeachCare to fully serve the poor before moving to provide taxpayer-subsidized coverage to the children of the middle class. Who could argue?
Lots of Democrats, for one. On Friday, the administration rejected New York’s application because it has not yet enrolled at least 95 percent of the state’s poor children. “New York has not demonstrated that its program operates in an effective and efficient manner with respect to the core population of targeted low-income children,” said the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Kerry Weems.
U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who slipped a $2 million taxpayer-financed earmark into a labor and health appropriations bill in July to create a “Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service” at the City College of New York, found the federal decision to serve the poor first “unconscionable.”
“It’s clear,” said Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “the administration is spoiling for a fight and it’s unfortunate he has chosen children’s health care.”
Weems noted, too, that children of the middle class should not be enrolled in the program for the poor until they have been uninsured for a year. A Congressional Budget Office study found that up to half of the children enrolled in state programs such as PeachCare came from families where parents had either dropped or elected not to purchase available private insurance because the taxpayer offering is better and cheaper. You can’t blame the parents, but you can apply rules to discourage the dumping of middle class children onto the backs of taxpayers, as the administration did.
In addition to the unwarranted expansion of SCHIP, The New York Times reported last month that its analysis of the House bill reveals hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for specific hospitals. One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, straddles the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Times reported. Yet, in the House bill it’s “moved” 200 miles to Chicago, where Medicare reimbursements are higher.
In all, millions of dollars a year are directed to about 40 favored hospitals, the Times found. Two hospitals in Kingston, N.Y., are “moved” 80 miles to New York City. Admittedly, Democrats didn’t invent the practice of “moving” favored hospitals. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican, “moved” a hospital from rural Dixon, Ill., to Chicago 95 miles away in 1999.
Democrats vowed when they took control of Congress that they’d reform earmarks, but there’s little evidence anything has changed.
The president has the veto pen, and he should use it on either version of SCHIP. He should, too, take up the crusade on earmarks. In the meantime, however, his administration is demonstrating life and a willingness to use the bureaucracy to fight back on the unnecessary expansion of government.
Permalink | Comments (39) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
