President Bush delivered on his promise to veto the SCHIP bill sent to him by Congress. This, despite the sanctimonious hokum emanating from all manner of faux-progressive poseurs throughout the wackosphere, is good news.
As I have pointed out again and again, the SCHIP bill that Congress produced was among the most egregious frauds ever perpetrated on […]
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Posted 03 October 2007
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Politicians who represent themselves as the champions of the less fortunate are planning to place the financial burden of SCHIP expansion squarely on the backs of the poor. As the AP puts it:
Congressional Democrats have chosen an unlikely source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in children’s health coverage: people […]
The advocates SCHIP expansion have now abandoned all pretense to rationality and settled on a strategy based wholly on moral posturing and prevarication. The essence of this tawdry approach is captured in a national ad being run by the American Cancer Society, approvingly described at GoozNews as follows:
Beneath a picture of a young child and […]
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Posted 29 September 2007
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Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich voted “No” on HR 976, the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. We know that anyone opposing SCHIP reauthorization hates children, so it obviously follows that Representatives Paul and Kucinich have an unreasoning antipathy to the wee bairns.
Because Paul, Kucinich, and an evil assortment of equally heartless House members voted […]
It looks like there’s going to be a good scrap over President Bush’s imminent veto of the SCHIP bill. The NYT, under the tendentious title, “Congress Set for Veto Fight on Child Health Care,” solemnly intones:
President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress prepared Monday for a showdown over the future of health insurance for more than […]
Michael Cannon, in this op-ed for the New York Post, advocates allowing SCHIP to sink. He correctly points out that the program forces the taxpayer to:
… subsidize people who don’t need help, discourage low-income families from climbing the economic ladder - and make private insurance more expensive for everyone else.
He also reiterates what objective observers have known […]
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Posted 25 September 2007
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One of the most disgraceful features of the congressional initiative to expand SCHIP involves the plan to pay for it by taxing the poor. The architects of this strategy have consistently denied that their proposed tobacco tax will have this effect, but a new study shows they shouldn’t be trusted. Its lead author puts it as follows:
Further tax hikes [on tobacco] […]
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Posted 02 September 2007
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In a column characterized by a fierce competition between sanctimony and sophistry, Bob Herbert inadvertently gives his readers a glimpse of the truth about SCHIP. He solemnly advises that President Bush’s opposition to that program’s expansion is driven by a “cruel” ideology …
… that views CHIP, correctly, as yet another important step on the road to universal health […]
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Posted 30 August 2007
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Paul Krugman, perpetuating the myth that SCHIP is about “the children,” advises his long-suffering readers that expansion of that program is analogous to providing public education:
We offer free education because giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.
The first point […]
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Posted 27 August 2007
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Nina Owcharenko has an excellent post at the Health Affairs blog, in which she points out one of the most egregious features of the proposed SCHIP legislation:
The bills would inevitably encourage those with private coverage to drop it in favor of SCHIP. Today, families at all income levels enjoy private coverage. The Congressional Budget Office […]
