Stealing healthcare from babies

Does president Bush really believe what he’s saying about the effort from congressional Democrats and some leading Senate Republicans to provide health coverage for millions of uninsured children? He’s portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward “government-run healthcare,” as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children.

In fact, Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance. It is doing so by expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a state-federal partnership that the Republican Congress and President Clinton created in 1997 to cover kids in working-poor families. Final votes on the House and Senate floors could come this week.

Bush, seemingly determined to provoke every possible confrontation with congressional Democrats, has pledged to veto the bills. And with the GOP congressional leadership, he is fighting the proposals with a swarm of misleading and hypocritical arguments.

Bush complains that expanding the program costs too much. But cost was no object when Bush and congressional Republicans sought to court seniors by creating the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003.

Under the bipartisan Senate bill, Washington would spend about $56 billion over the next five years to cover almost half of the nation’s uninsured children. Over the same period, the Medicare entitlement that Bush signed (after more than four-fifths of House and Senate Republicans voted for it) will cost nearly $330 billion. Is social spending affordable only when it benefits constituencies Republicans prize in elections?

Next, Bush complains that the SCHIP expansion would require “a huge tax increase.” Actually, both the House and Senate plans would raise taxes just on tobacco. And the sponsors are increasing taxes only because they have committed to the novel notion of paying for their program. When Bush and the Republican Congress created the expensive Medicare drug benefit, they did not provide any new revenue to fund it. They just billed the cost to the next generation through higher federal deficits. Now Bush is condemning Democrats for displaying more responsibility.

Bush also disparages the SCHIP expansion as an attempt “to encourage people to transfer from the private sector to government healthcare plans.” But studies have found that three-fourths of children covered under the current program receive their care through private insurance plans that contract with the states, notes Edwin Park of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In that way, the program is no different than Bush’s prescription drug plan: The government pays for services delivered by private insurance companies.

Bush’s argument that the SCHIP changes will unacceptably “crowd out” private insurance is misleading in another respect. It’s true, as Bush charges, that if the program is expanded, some eligible families would shift their children into it from private coverage, hoping to save money or improve care. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that children making such a switch would account for about one-third of the 6 million kids expected to enroll in the expanded SCHIP program under the Senate plan, and hence one-third of the added cost.

But as CBO Director Peter Orszag notes, all efforts to expand coverage for the uninsured inevitably spill some benefits on those who already have insurance. And the Senate SCHIP plan, by limiting that spillover to one-third of its cost, is actually more efficient than most alternatives for expanding coverage.

Bush, for instance, wants to reduce the number of uninsured by providing new tax incentives for buying coverage. But the Lewin Group, an independent consulting firm, recently calculated that 80% of the benefits from Bush’s plan would flow to people who already have insurance. Such numbers help explain why Orszag recently said that, dollar for dollar, expanding SCHIP “is pretty much as efficient as you can possibly get” to insure more kids.

Bush’s most outrageous argument is that expanding SCHIP “empower[s] bureaucrats.” In reality, covering more children would empower parents like Sheila Miguel of Sun Valley, Calif.

Miguel used to spend hours in emergency rooms trying to obtain asthma medicine for her daughter, Chelsea, but since enrolling her in a SCHIP-funded program, Miguel can take her to reliably scheduled clinic visits.

Bush says he wants “to put more power” over healthcare “in the hands of individuals.” By freeing Miguel’s family from the worry and drudgery of repeated emergency room visits, that’s exactly what SCHIP does.

Few of the lower-income working families that rely on this program have the time to follow this week’s legislative struggle, much less analyze how it serves the White House’s apparent strategy of embroiling congressional Democrats in unrelenting conflicts with Bush that alienate swing voters. In that political skirmishing, these families have been reduced to collateral damage. They deserve something better from a president who once called himself a “compassionate conservative.”

ronald.brownstein@latimes.com