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Monday, October 15, 2007
SCHIP scheme: Don’t use children as pawns
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Milked shamelessly by partisans who see children as a political instrument to regain the White House, Democrats are mounting a last-minute campaign to override President Bush’s veto of a costly new entitlement along the road to HillaryCare.
“We’ll try very hard to override it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said Sunday of Thursday’s planned vote. “But one thing’s for sure, we won’t rest until those 10 million children have health care.”
They’ll not rest until 10 million children — and the rest of America — have taxpayer-provided health insurance with bureaucrats setting the rates and practicing medicine. We’ve seen already in efforts at the state level to creep coverage upward and outward and to mandate benefits by legislative edict body-part-by-body-part how this drama ends.
If Democrats are successful in using the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to put another Clinton in the White House, the end could be soon.
This program, incidentally, is a measure of how far national government has sunk and how dysfunctional Congress has become. Its 11 percent approval rating is earned.
Democrats don’t have the override votes, something they’ve known from the start. “Having conceded that they will not override the president’s veto,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Roswell), “Democrats should move immediately to work with House Republicans to develop bipartisan legislation that puts our neediest children first and lives up to the original intent of the program.”
After failing to override President Bush’s veto, Republicans will offer full reauthorization of the program for children in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level, or about $41,300 for a family of four. They’ll offer tax credits for families between 200 and 300 percent of poverty, helping those families keep existing coverage or provide them income to buy coverage in the private sector. Another element would encourage states to experiment in helping make policies available to the working poor.
Cooperation may not be in the cards, though, any more than veto override, despite efforts to flip Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon). Marshall wisely voted no to a huge expansion of a program that, when the details are made known to mainstream Georgia voters, would have gotten him defeated. Instead, now, the leftists in his Middle Georgia district are in a dither and determined to extract revenge. It’s an empty threat, though.
The threat is just as empty as the promises that a 61-cents-per-pack hike in tobacco taxes will fund the proposed expansion. The Washington-based Heritage Foundation studied that promise and found that 22 million more people would have to take up smoking for the math to work. But, then, the cost-projection numbers are phony.
The Senate bill, the lesser of the two in terms of cost, increases spending from the current $5.6 billion per year to $13.9 billion in 2012 — and then projects the cost to drop 69 percent in 2013 to $7.8 billion and to $4.8 billion the next, Heritage points out. It’s phony.
Of the newly eligible children, 30 percent to 35 percent would be shifted from private insurance, Heritage projects.
Earlier the Congressional Budget Office projected that of 1.2 million children newly eligible, about half would have come as a result of dropping private coverage.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said more than 500,000 low-income children are eligible but not participating in the current program — but 700,000 adults are.
In Minnesota, for example, 87 percent of the beneficiaries of the State Children’s Health Insurance program are adults. That’s 5,243 children and 34,313 adults. In Wisconsin, it’s 66 percent. That’s 56,627 children and 110,298 adults. In New Jersey, it’s 38 percent adults; in Arizona, 53 percent and in Michigan, 46.
SCHIP reauthorization will be a test of whether official Washington is into governing — or is simply too mired in partisan politics to get past dreams of 2008.
This fight is not about children. It’s about how adults vote.
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The deserving aside, should Gore run?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the Right, at least, the reaction to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was muted. The best of the lot was a The Wall Street Journal opinion piece that never mentions him. Instead, it touts the deserving candidates the committee by-passed to choose Gore. Here’s a flavor of the piece:
“In Olso Friday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country’s military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.
“The prize was also not awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year while protesting peacefully against dictator Robert Mugabe.
“Or to Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam arrested this year and sentenced to eight years in prison for helping the pro-democracy group Block 8406.
“Or to Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, co-founders of the League of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia, who are waging a modest struggle with grand ambitions to secure basic rights for women in that Muslim country.
“Or to Colombian President Àlvaro Uribe, who has fought tirelessly to end the violence wrought by left-wing terrorists and drug lords in his country….”
And on it goes.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who’s now thinking about a 2012 presidential race — he’ll be 69 then — said “it’s perfectly appropriate for Gore to win the Nobel Prize because it only goes to very left-wing people who are critical of America.”
When the committee overlooks the deserving to anoint Gore for an alarmist movie, the political nature of the prize does become obvious. Both Gore and Jimmy Carter, the 2002 recipient, should send thank-you notes to George W. Bush. As the New York Times noted,”Gore is the second Democratic Party politician from the United States to win the peace prize this decade.” Both are die-hard Bush critics.
The Times observed, too, that “the prestigious award ignited a new spark of interest in his plans both among Democrats and Republicans.” The AJC headline says the “Nobel win makes Gore a hot political property.”
Maybe. But why should Gore run for president? He can’t beat Hillary and even if he could a nation in the midst of an actual war is not ready for a Don Quxiote president. I’ll leave it to our left of center friends who congregate here to make the case for a Gore presidency. I’d remind them, however, that they’re not the Nobel Committee and while bashing Bush may be sufficient grounds for one prize, it’s not enough for the White House.
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