Health insurance for children

David Brooks on Sept. 28 had an Op Ed in the NYT about the phony pain Congress suffers when speaking of our debt. "The U.S. government has $43 trillion in unfunded liabilities, or $350,000 for every taxpayer," he writes. Congress has a Mardis Gras-tomorrow will never come mentality.

These habits infect everything they touch, even a straightforward and successful program like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of uninsured children has been declining steadily for years. It shouldn’t be that costly or hard to insure the ones that are left.

And yet because S-chip is a product of the current climate, the expansion plan in Congress has all sorts of corruptions and dishonesties built in. First, it perpetuates a smoke screen of obfuscation between who pays and who chooses. States have an incentive to ramp up benefits because they know that most of the cost will be borne by taxpayers somewhere else. Second, it entices children out of private and into public insurance, even though after 2012 it cannot cover the cost.

I have little sympathy for smokers, but I do admit, I don't know any college-educated, well-off smokers. They've sucked it in, endured the headaches and quit. The smokers I do know are blue collar folks--retail, hospitality, auto repair, clerical, factory, construction. So Brooks zeros in on the wealth transfer that will have to take place for this entitlement.

The S-chip bill takes money from these relatively poor, politically immobilized people and shifts it to those making up to $62,000 a year. Nobody is raising a tax on wine consumption or gasoline consumption to pay for this benefit. Instead, Congress is taxing the weakest possible group [lower income smokers] in order to shift benefits to others, some of whom are middle class.

Have you ever noticed that if a government program is successful and begins to eliminate the problem it was set out to solve, Congress will expand it out of fear of losing a piece of the action?