State Children's Health Insurance Program / Program should be expanded
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Position: Program should be expanded
This position addresses the topic State Children's Health Insurance Program.
For this position
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"The program is widely considered a success, cutting the rate of uninsured low-income children by one-third. Its major flaw has been inadequate federal funding: roughly six million children who qualify for SCHIP and Medicaid remain uninsured as a result." | 
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From GOP opposition will backfire, by Tom Daschle, John Podesta (The Miami Herald, September 28, 2007) (view)
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"The president says SCHIP is an unacceptable expansion of government-run health care. That would be a much more compelling argument if the Bush administration also condemned Medicaid and Medicare, which together cover about 100 million people, as socialized medicine. SCHIP covers roughly 6 million now, and the renewal would push it above 9 million. In any case, should kids be caught in an ideological squabble?" |
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From Plan to protect kids' health spawns needless veto fight, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, September 27, 2007) (view)
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"To hear the president tell it, he has long supported the joint federal-state program, and his budget for fiscal year 2008 proposes an additional $5 billion in federal funds spread over the next five years, a 20 percent increase over current levels. What he doesn’t say is that this paltry sum is not even enough to provide continued coverage for all of the children who are currently enrolled, let alone enroll millions more of the uninsured." |
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From Gunfight at the S-Chip Corral, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, September 25, 2007) (view)
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"We all chip in and fund children's health insurance through our federal government. And we make sure the coverage is decent by regulating the private companies involved. In return, we all save money and strengthen our economy as kids get more preventative care, instead of waiting for grievous illness to take them to the ER. This is not theory. While more and more adults have had to go without health insurance, SCHIP has increased the percentage of kids with health insurance. It is simply a proven success." |
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From Are You For Good Government or Bad Government?, by Bill Scher (The Huffington Post, September 24, 2007) (view)
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"There are few, if any, more deserving causes than CHIP. The state-federal program provides health coverage to more than 6 million of the neediest Americans, and must be expanded to cover more. CHIP is the only safety net for these children, whose illnesses and injuries otherwise would be treated in pricey emergency rooms (which Bush is on record as approving), with the bills coming due to all Americans in higher taxes and insurance premiums." |
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From Right on, Orrin!: Senator is right to oppose Bush over CHIP, by The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board (The Salt Lake Tribune, September 23, 2007) (view)
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"What’s driving much of the Republican response to the bill is the White House’s contention that expanding S-chip is “an incremental step toward the Democrats’ goal of a government-run health system.” The only word that conforms to reality here is “incremental.” S-chip is a tiny blip in the federal budget compared with Medicare and Medicaid, the giant government-financed health systems. House members need to think hard whether it is worth denying coverage to millions of uninsured children just to keep the blip a little smaller." |
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From Misleading Spin on Children’s Health, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, October 5, 2007) (view)
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"He says the bill costs too much. But for the price of one day in Iraq, we could cover 256,000 children. One week would cover 1.8 million children. And just over one month of the Iraq war would cover the full cost of the bill and insure 10 million children for a whole year. Because the current SCHIP program falls far short of meeting the need, hundreds of thousands of children have lost their coverage on President Bush's watch." |
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"Like any administration, this one has broad authority to interpret and administer laws. It could — as conservative Republican backers of the SCHIP bill, such as Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, have repeatedly pointed out — deny any future New York request on the grounds that 400% of poverty is simply not "low income."" |
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From Bush gives bogus answers to the $83,000 question, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, October 17, 2007) (view)
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"The Bush "boom" has created a small amount of jobs. In addition, the economy has lost high-paying jobs in the manufacturing and information technology - jobs that use to supply the health care for their employees. As a result, median income has declined during this expansion. At the same time, the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed making it more and more unaffordable for more American." |
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From The Economic Reasons Why the Middle Class Needs SCHIP, by Hale Stewart (The Huffington Post, October 17, 2007) (view)
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"Because there are limits to the empowerment of consumers, there are limits to how well a private health market can function. And that's before you get to the question of the uninsured, to which the free market has no answer. Some degree of government intervention in health care is therefore inevitable and desirable. It is ideological nonsense to suggest that this intervention displaces an otherwise efficient private market." |
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Against this position
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"So the outcome of this budget charade is that the SCHIP expansion will either cost $110 billion, which is $40 billion more than the Democrats admit, or will draw millions of children into the SCHIP program — many of whom already have health insurance today — and then yank the rug out from under them in 2012." |
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From Bill is an attempt to nationalize care, by Zach Wamp (The Tennessean, September 28, 2007) (view)
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"Schip is designed as a ratchet that jacks up the government's share of health-care spending, and every time it grows it steals customers from private insurance. All the more so because states have been raising eligibility levels above the 200% of the federal poverty line that Schip was intended to serve. The Democratic bill raises the effective national level to 300%, and it overrules a sensible Bush Administration directive that states enroll low-income families before subsidizing the middle class." |
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From Schip for Everyone, by The Wall Street Journal editorial board (The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2007) (view)
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"Democrats in Congress would more than double government spending on SCHIP and extend the program to families earning as much as $83,000 a year. But their plan would add fewer than 3 million children to SCHIP, and many of the newly eligible children already have private insurance. So instead of insuring nearly 20 million more Americans privately, Congress would spend billions of dollars to move middle-income Americans off private insurance and onto public assistance." |
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"Today, some 6.6 million kids are covered under SCHIP, at a cost of about $25 billion over five years. The new bill raises that to 9 million kids covered, at a cost of $60 billion. It pays for it with a 61-cent hike in the tobacco tax. Sounds good, except that tax will hit the poor hardest. And those it helps are not poor. Under the new bill, families earning $83,000 a year could be eligible." |
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From SCHIP Charade, by Investor's Business Daily editorial board (Investor's Business Daily, September 26, 2007) (view)
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"The real Republican/conservative alternative to the SCHIP expansion should be to block grant both Medicaid and SCHIP back to the states, using the model of the highly successful 1996 reform of the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Under those reforms, the welfare rolls under the old program declined by about 60 percent nationwide." |
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"Inevitably, many families simply substitute SCHIP for private coverage. Economists Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Kosali Simon of Cornell University find that, in effect, when government expands eligibility for SCHIP and Medicaid, six out of every 10 people added to the rolls already have private coverage. Only four in 10 were previously uninsured. In other words, SCHIP and Medicaid cover four previously uninsured Americans for the price of 10. " |
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"The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader Western world. They expect to be able to work "part-time" and "intermittently" but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health care costs. Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners?" |
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"By making it explicit that federal S-CHIP dollars will fund programs up to 300 percent of the poverty line (and occasionally even higher) and by throwing an additional $35 billion at the program throughout the next five years, the Democratic bill guarantees the program will grow well beyond its original purpose of insuring “near-poor” kids. This makes sense only as a step toward national health insurance for kids." |
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From The Children’s Crusade — for Socialized Medicine, by Rich Lowry (National Review, October 19, 2007) (view)
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"More than half the nation's uninsured children are already eligible for either SCHIP or Medicaid, but their parents have not enrolled them. The better focus, then, is to get those kids enrolled. Bush suggests that focus as the basis for compromise. He suggests in vain." |
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From A better focus, by The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board (The San Diego Union-Tribune, October 18, 2007) (view)
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"Already, two-thirds of children who do not have health insurance are eligible for federal help through either Schip or Medicaid. Congress's first priority should be to make sure these poorer, uninsured children are taken care of. Yet states have struggled to get these children enrolled, which means that if there is a stampede to add higher-income kids to Schip, the poorer kids will likely continue to get left behind." |
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From There Are Better Ways to Insure Kids, by Grace-Marie Turner (The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2007) (view)
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"We should focus on helping uninsured kids get health insurance. The vetoed bill would waste billions of dollars encouraging families with private health insurance to drop it and substitute government-provided insurance. If our goal is to help reduce the number of uninsured children, it makes no sense to move 2 million kids from private insurance onto a government program." |
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"The Constitution has no Health Care Clause. Nor does it include any other provision that authorizes Congress to spend taxpayers' money on health insurance for the children of the working poor, the grandparents of the middle class, the nephews of the super-rich, or the kin of any other socioeconomic group." |
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"Most children in these higher-income families, unsurprisingly, are already covered by private insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 77 percent of children in families earning more than twice the poverty line have private health insurance now." |
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From Truth about Bush's SCHIP veto doesn't match harsh rhetoric, by Grace-Marie Turner (The Baltimore Sun, October 14, 2007) (view)
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