Failing America¹s Neediest Children
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070718_failing_americas_neediest
_children/
Posted on Jul 18, 2007
By Marie Cocco
Back in the days of the Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich
declared Bill Clinton to be irrelevant, only to discover that the
president of the United States is relevant; when Republicans forced a
shutdown of the government to prove their point that Americans wanted
deep cuts in popular programs such as Medicare, only to discover that
they don¹t; when Clinton won re-election and it was clear that he was
not going away, Clinton and Gingrich at last joined hands and seemed
to sing political ³Kumbaya.²
They reached deals that, at the time, were praised as the productive
fruit of bipartisanship. One of them was a 1997 budget agreement that
simultaneously helped to move the federal budget further toward
balance and created a new government program‹the State Children¹s
Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)‹that fused Democrats¹ desire to
extend health insurance to those without it with Republicans¹ demand
that no top-down system be created to do so. SCHIP insures low-income
children through a combination of federal money and state
partnerships with private insurers. It is both successful‹reducing
the number of uninsured children by a third‹and wildly popular.
³The joke sometimes on the Hill is that everybody, whether they are
Republicans or Democrats, thinks of themselves as the father or
mother of SCHIP,² says Cindy Mann, a professor at Georgetown
University¹s Health Policy Institute.
Now the Bush administration has decided to make it an orphan.
It threatens to veto a bipartisan measure to reauthorize the
children¹s health program, even though the plan has overwhelming
support in the Senate and a similar version would easily pass the
House. The usual combination of ideology leavened with untruths is
used to pump up conservative criticism of the program, though for a
decade there¹s been almost none.
SCHIP is tantamount to a ³Washington-run, government-owned plan where
government makes the choices, where government sets the prices, where
government then taxes the people to pay the bill,² Health and Human
Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt told reporters recently. The
White House also opposes a planned tobacco tax increase to help pay
for the insurance.
But much of what Leavitt says is untrue. State governments, not
³Washington,² run the program. They in turn pay private managed-care
insurance plans to cover the children, as they do for most children
now enrolled in Medicaid. States, not Washington, determine
income-eligibility limits and specify the benefits covered, in
conjunction with the private insurers. In other words, the children¹s
health program works much more like employer-sponsored health
insurance than it does a ³government-owned plan.²
This is what Gingrich intended.
During the debate over creating the new program, Republicans insisted
that it not be a government ³entitlement²‹like Medicare and
Medicaid‹under which all those who qualify for benefits are
guaranteed them. The insurance plan was created as a block grant to
states, with funding capped‹so that as states ran out of money (say,
because of ever-rising health care costs) they couldn¹t serve more
children even if the kids qualified for help. This is, in part, why
there are still 9 million uninsured children. Nearly half of them‹4.1
million‹would be helped under the Senate version of the measure. Of
those, 3.5 million are in families with incomes that already make
them eligible for the government programs, but they haven¹t been
enrolled for various reasons.
³The position that the White House is taking is far to the right of
the position that Newt Gingrich and the rest of the Republicans took
in 1997,² says Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, which analyzes and promotes programs for
low-income people.
The 1997 deal passed unanimously in the Senate. In the House, the
majority of votes in favor came from Republicans, many of them known
at the time as conservative firebrands. To the White House, this now
seems like some historical mistake‹though candidate George W. Bush,
in 2004, pledged to lead an ³aggressive effort² to enroll millions of
poor children who were eligible for government-subsidized health
insurance but weren¹t being served. This is the group the Senate
measure would target for help.
One day historians‹and who knows, maybe a small army of shrinks‹will
dissect the essential mystery of the Bush era. Why, with so much
ineptitude obvious on so many fronts, does the president persist in
creating more opportunity for failure? Especially when those he would
fail are our neediest kids.
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get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.
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