Tossing the chips

Those of you raised in rural areas who may have had the opportunity in your youth to walk barefoot through a cow pasture, know what a chip is--when thrown it can have the feel of a hockey puck. Keep that in mind has you listen to the howls that Bush hates children because of his veto of increases in the S-CHIP program. Here's a summary from Congressman Jeff Miller about the expansion of services (poor children are already covered--this moves up to the next quintile and above),

Under the SCHIP expansion, an estimated 1 million to 1.2 million children would gain SCHIP coverage, but between 467,000 and 611,000 children would lose private coverage.

The annual cost to taxpayers of covering an uninsured child under the Senate's expansion plan would increase from $1,418 to between $2,508 and $2,859. This is 1.8 to 2 times the cost of SCHIP coverage for a child in a family at this income level or almost 2.5 times the average cost of private insurance.

The bill increases the age of "children" eligible for benefits to 25 years and permits States to continue to enroll childless adults.

The expansion would be financed by increased tobacco taxes, including a 61-cent increase in the cigarette tax, to $1 per pack. The bill assumes that there will be 22 million new smokers a year to ensure budget neutrality.

Expanding SCHIP to cover children in higher income families is not an efficient or cost-effective way to reduce the ranks of uninsured children.

The proposal put forward by Democrats would render the current income eligibility requirement for SCHIP meaningless and create an open-ended government entitlement for families, many of whom already have private insurance coverage.

And let's not forget, that this isn't about insuring poor children (no one 25 is a child and people without children aren't parents), it's about universal health care. If you've been hearing the horror stories about boomers and medicare, imagine that for everyone, but with personal health insurance destroyed.

Copied from an op ed in NewsBlaze.