July 22, 2007, 7:30PM
That's the problem
President Bush suggests uninsured children go to hospital emergency rooms
for their care.


Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

After the Senate Finance Committee approved an expansion of the federal
Children's Health Insurance Program to cover nearly 10 million kids,
President Bush offered a strange rationale for threatening to veto it.

"People have access to health care in America," he told an audience in
Cleveland. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."

As any executive of a Houston hospital can attest, that is precisely the
problem created by the high number of uninsured people in the United States.
Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, and Harris
County the highest in the state. Those who lack insurance coverage
frequently delay seeking medical care until they are seriously ill. Then
they swamp hospital emergency rooms that are required by law to treat them
even if the patient has no ability to pay.

Since emergency care is far more expensive than a scheduled visit to a
doctor or clinic, hospitals wind up with large costs that they then pass on
to insured patients using their overtaxed facilities. As a result, insurance
companies raise their rates ever higher to cover the increased payouts,
making their policies too expensive for more working families. The result is
a health care system spiraling out of control and more children left
unprotected and in poor health.

The senators who voted 17-4 to expand the S-CHIP understand the situation.
Their plan would boost funding for S-CHIP from $25 billion to $60 billion
for the next five years with the aim of covering 3 million more children.
The measure would provide a uniform eligibility level of three times the
poverty line for a family with four children, $51,510. The increase would be
primarily funded by a steep hike in federal taxes on cigarettes and other
tobacco products

The Bush administration insists on holding the increase to $5 billion over
the five year period, a level that U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said
would not even maintain the current number of children enrolled.

Administration officials claim that expanding the program would undermine
the insurance industry. But having more children insured would lower costs
passed on to private insurers and employers.

Perhaps the most dubious reason cited by the White House for opposing the
increase concerns the tax hike on cigarettes, which would go up from 39
cents a pack to a dollar. According to spokesman Tony Fratto, it would
unfairly penalize the poor "to finance a new subsidy for the middle class."
He didn't mention that higher tobacco taxes would likely reduce teen access
to cigarettes and lower the health care costs of treating millions of
Americans for respiratory disease and cancer caused by smoking.

America's health care system is broken. Expanding S-CHIP is a stopgap
measure that would expand the number of Americans with access to health
care.