The New York Times is reporting a bipartisan agreement has been reached in the U.S. Senate on an extension to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which expires on September 30. This extension contemplates an increase in funding for the program of thirty five billion, bringing the five year total to sixty billion dollars. Currently the Federal Government provides five billion dollars annually to the states for the program. The House has agreed upon an even larger increase, leaving little doubt that the President will see a bill that expands this program substantially. The Senate would increase the federal excise tax on cigarettes sixty one cents to one dollar, to help fund the program. President Bush, predictably, has threatened a veto over the size of the proposal and the increased excise on tobacco. The Times cites some changes to the law that are significant.
Under the Senate agreement, states could use information from food stamps and other assistance programs to locate and enroll youngsters eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. States could also use the child health program to cover the costs of prenatal care for pregnant women.
But federal officials could not grant additional waivers to the states for coverage of adults. About 670,000 adults were covered last year as a result of such waivers, some of which were granted or renewed by the Bush administration.
Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican supporter of the bill, also points to financial restrictions on health care assistance for families not within the financial range outlined.
Mr. Grassley said the agreement would refocus the program on low-income children. It would reduce payments to the states for coverage of children with family incomes exceeding three times the poverty level. (The poverty level is $20,650 for a family of four.)
And what is driving the Bush Administration opposition? Conservative punditry has been sounding the alarm bells over SCHIP for some time now, with an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal making SCHIP the battlefield over Democratic attempts to “socialize medicine”. With bipartisan support this bill has a good chance of surviving a veto fight with the President. It seems surreal that the President would fight this proposed assistance over finances while spending the proposed five year total in Iraq over several months. (Give or take a few months). Even key Republicans are incredulous over the veto threat.
In a joint statement, Senators Grassley and Hatch said such threats were “disappointing, even a little unbelievable.”
Read the New York Times article at this link.
Bill Manzi.com 
Your Honor,
As an engineer who has developed proposals for potential customers,I have always been aware of feature creep when the job is sold. Feature creep is the attempt of the customer to add post contract items to the specification without paying for them. A lot of times they get what they want and the job is completed with financial loss.
Politically, for a conservative, feature creep would be the enactment of a series of legislation giving power to the federal government until the total gives the government overwhelming power. It is a condition of “death by a thousands cuts”.
Is it a good thing to help poor children? It sure is. Is socialism good for our country, It sure isn’t.
We had better be alert to what transpires in Washington as our liberty slowly slips away.
Case in point. The law according to the Times,the new regulations allows the federal government to gather information from their assistance program records to find those not on the health program. Remember what happened when the FBI wanted to collect information from libraries to data mine potential terror subversives based on what their reading habits are.? (I found this too much) From a freedom viewpoint why is mining assistance programs different?
I will always remind you that once the government is in charge, it never goes away.
Jules
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Well the Wall Street Journal has written an editorial attacking the SCHIP renewal, demanding that Republicans stop negotiating price, and simply oppose the whole concept. No “Democratic lite” for the folks over at the Journal editorial page. And apparently the President agrees, coming out against the renewal in the Washington Post on “philosophical grounds”. Read the Post story at this link.
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Your Honor,
Here is another take on the matter from Dick morris that puts another blush on the matter.
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on July 25, 2007.
It took more than a decade of constant agitation for the elderly to win the right to charge their prescription medications to Medicare. Republican reluctance to spend the money combined with a Democratic willingness to put off action so as to keep the issue in partisan play. The result was that it took a Republican president to undo the political knot and pass a plan that finally offered senior citizens some relief.
We are now watching House Democrats play the same partisan game with the renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which expires on Sept. 30. Meanwhile, the Senate on the one hand and President Bush on the other appear to have crafted a generous extension of the program that may now fall prey to the House Democratic desire to provoke a presidential veto — and the children be damned!
Bush opened the game by proposing a $5 billion expansion of the program to cover more children and to limit the focus of the program to child health insurance. This highly successful program, initiated in the middle of the Clinton administration, has now succeeded in reducing the proportion of uncovered children to less than 10 percent (many of whom could get Medicaid if their parents bothered to apply). States have moved to use the program to expand coverage of adults without insurance and the Bush administration wished to restrict the practice.
But the Senate went further and is pushing a $35 billion program, financed by an increase of at least 60 cents in the federal cigarette tax. The extra money would bring the five-year cost to $60 billion. Crafted by Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) along with Democrats Max Baucus (Mont.) and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), the plan would make child coverage virtually universal and permit states to access food stamp and other assistance program data to locate uncovered children and bring them into the program. But it would restrict the coverage of adults.
Raising the tobacco levy is a good thing to do anyway, even if you don’t need the money. A higher cigarette tax has been demonstrably shown to cut teen smoking, and the increase, which would bring the total levy to $1 per pack, is a good step to improve national healthcare.
Bush threatened a veto, but seems to have backed off and appears able to live with the Senate bill.
So the House decided to pass a bill he couldn’t sign. By deliberately provoking a veto, they hope to demonstrate what a heartless Scrooge Bush really is.
Not only is the House upping the price tag to $50 billion, it is gratuitously courting the favor of the medical establishment by eliminating the cuts in physician fees scheduled for the next few years as part of the effort to save Medicare without cutting benefits. The House bill also opens the doors of the program wide to adult coverage. Covering adults is a good idea. It would be great to cover all Americans without having to fundamentally alter our healthcare system. That way, socialist utopians like Hillary couldn’t use the uncovered population as an excuse to make healthcare a government-dominated program.
But House leaders know full well that Bush won’t sign the bill that repeals his Medicare physician fee cuts and opens the program to adult coverage. But they are determined, nevertheless, to jerry-rig a bill that Bush can’t sign by festooning it with provisions that not only endanger the future of the Medicare program they profess to adore but also may kindle a new round of medical cost inflation they profess to abhor.
The House should just back off. It is a major accomplishment in health care, the new third rail of our politics, to expand SCHIP to cover all children. Forcing the administration to give up its hard-won gains on Medicare cost containment to swallow the program is deliberately unrealistic.
If this proves to be true, these guys are putting politics ahead of poor children’s health.
The game goes on.
(how do you get the italic font? Itried it in word but it came in straight up)
Jules
Jules
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