Government health care for kids

The Democratic Party’s drive to bring taxpayer-subsidized health care to the middle class picked up steam this summer when Congress voted to heap billions of dollars in new funding on insurance for children.

Democrats claim they’re trying to help poor children, and that anyone who opposes expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (and the tax increases needed to pay for it) is a heartless miser who’s apathetic toward a permanent underclass of uninsured sick kids.

The problem with such claims is that the federal government already has a partnership with states to provide health care to the poor. It’s called Medicaid, and its liabilities are already swallowing greater and greater slices of states’ funding pies.

In fact, SCHIP isn’t a program for the poor at all. It’s for families who earn two to three times the poverty level, even those who have their children covered by employer policies. It’s an attempt to make millions more Americans dependent on government-run health care — creating another dependent constituency that will vote accordingly.

Enter President Bush, who last week applied the brakes. Having already promised to veto the $35 billion expansion of SCHIP, he announced in a letter to state health officials that they must enforce more stringent eligibility guidelines for SCHIP applicants.

Any child from a household that earns more than 250 percent of the federal poverty standard — $51,625 for a family of four — must be uninsured for at least one year before being enrolled in SCHIP. And within a year, states must prove that they’ve successfully enrolled 95 percent of children from families that make less than 200 percent of the poverty level.

The president’s order has two clear goals:

— To prevent millions of children who currently have or might soon get private health insurance from burdening taxpayers by switching to SCHIP coverage. Such a churning of insurance enrollment would decrease participation in employment-based plans and lead to higher premiums for those who don’t qualify for government assistance.

–To force states to focus their enrollment efforts on the truly needy, rather than expand entitlements and make the resulting expenses more difficult to later rein in.

Naturally, Democrats and their allies in academia and social service bureaucracies are upset about it. Cindy Mann, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post the new standards “would effectively foreclose the opportunity for states to cover children in families with incomes of about $40,000 to $50,000 a year, depending on the size of family.”

But since when should taxpayers be on the hook for ensuring families earning $50,000 a year purchase health insurance to cover their children? These are not poor folks.

Indeed, Democrats desperately want to expand SCHIP eligibility because millions of eligible families simply choose not to enroll, even for as little as $10 per month, per child, plus small co-pays.

SCHIP will expire at the end of next month if it is not reauthorized. President Bush’s order should put Congress on a more fiscally sensible path when it meets to work out differences between House and Senate plans. If lawmakers don’t make satisfactory compromises, he should veto the legislation.