Bush threatens to veto Schip funding

Congress, before leaving for its August recess has fueled some important debates, amongst which, the biggest discussion revolves around the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip).

The program, pushed and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1997, has been proved to be a success. Last year, it provided health coverage to 6.6 million low-income children at a cost of $5 billion to the federal government.

Schip was created with the purpose of helping the uninsured, and allowed bonus payments to states that enrolled more people in the program. Made to "crowd out" private coverage and replace it with federal welfare, those under 25 are labeled as children in the bill and "low income" is up to 400% above the poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four.

However, President George W. Bush believes that the federal-state health insurance should be treated like the government treats food and housing: available to low-income Americans who need it, but not to everyone.

He reprimanded the leaders of Congress and members of the Republican Senate Finance Committee who backed the legislation regarding expansion of Schip, threatening to veto bills that would have provided health coverage for 5 million poor or near-poor children.

“The legislation dramatically expands federal spending far beyond what is necessary to reauthorize Schip responsibly,” they proclaimed in defense.

Schip is designed to be re-authorized every 10 years and Bush is prepared to do that but he opposes proposals to expand eligibility to families who are more than 200% above the poverty line.

Mr. Bush wants Schip's funding to be $5 billion over five years, which would mean shirking hundreds of thousands of children of program benefits.

At current rates, nearly 1 million children covered under Schip in an average month will be removed from coverage, while more than 5 million currently eligible for that program or Medicaid will remain uninsured.

They say, in order to be covered under a Government insurance plan, millions will drop their private insurance. But it remains known that every coverage-expansion plan -- conservative or progressive -- benefits some people who already have insurance.

Quite conveniently, the White House fails to offer any alternate plan to keep even a part of these 5-6 million children from going to sleep every night without health insurance.