E.J. Dionne: Bush Goes Down with the SCHIP

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from Truthdig:


Bush Goes Down with the SCHIP



Posted on Sep 25, 2007
By E.J. Dionne

WASHINGTON—This week’s showdown over children’s health insurance is the first skirmish in the new battle for universal health coverage. It is also the first confrontation between the president and Congress fought out almost entirely on terms set by the new Democratic majority.

On no spending issue do Democrats have broader public support—or more Republican allies—than on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That is why they have chosen this as the issue on which they want to take their first stand.

Bush, in the meantime, has confirmed what was clear when he was governor of Texas but little noted when he first ran for president: When it comes to expanding government-sponsored health insurance for low-income kids, he is a skeptic. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt coined a new word last week by saying that it’s “the ideologic question that we want to focus on.” He was candidly describing an administration dug into a posture that even conservative Republicans in Congress reject.

On its face, Bush’s fight over SCHIP seems oddly chosen. The program provides coverage for children from families too poor to afford private insurance but not eligible for Medicaid. In many ways, it is a Republican creation. It made it through a GOP Congress in 1997 thanks to the work of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who is now furious about Bush’s veto threat.

By virtually all measures, the program has achieved exactly what it promised, and at a reasonable cost. But Bush argues that the $35 billion five-year expansion of the program, worked out between the Democrats and such leading Republicans as Hatch and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, might push too many children into government insurance. Bush wants a $5 billion expansion over five years, which the Congressional Budget Office says would eventually shove more than 1 million children off the program at a moment when the number of kids without health insurance is growing after years of decline. (That decline, by the way, was due in significant part to the success of SCHIP.) The goal of Hatch, Grassley and the Democrats is to expand the program to 10 million children from the roughly 6.6 million covered now.

This battle is central to the long-term goal of universal coverage. If a proposal with broad bipartisan support that is friendly to state governments and covers the most beloved group in society—children—can’t avoid being gutted for ideological reasons, what hope is there for a larger health compromise? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070925_bush_goes_down_with_the_schip/