Health Care BS

Advocates of expanded SCHIP funding have consistently misrepresented the reauthorization debate as a Manichean struggle between good and evil or, somewhat less stridently, an unfortunate clash of ideologies.  In reality, the debate is about preventing the program from being used as a Trojan horse for socialized medicine.

Having learned that government-run health care won’t sell if it is honestly put before the public, its advocates are now using “the children” to implement Hillarycare on the sly. That’s why SCHIP’s latest iteration is designed to cover children who already have health insurance. As the Secretary of HHS puts it:

Most of the children they want to add to SCHIP already have private insurance. So these children would give up the private insurance they have now as they move to government health care.

And this isn’t some bogus statistic worked up by some soulless minion of the “health care industrial complex”:

The CBO recently estimated that as many as half of the children enrolling in SCHIP would drop their private coverage. The independent National Bureau of Economic Research put the crowd-out rate as high as 60 percent.

None of this matters to the evangelists of socialized medicine, of course. Nor are they especially concerned about cost. However, as a comical sop to those worried about the price tag associated with an expanded SCHIP program, they have proposed offsetting costs with a cigar tax.

Let’s hope President Bush has got that veto pen locked, loaded and aimed at this fraudulent legislation.