7-19-07, 9:24 am

As Bush battles Congress to keep his war going, he has just fired the opening salvo in another war... on America's children.

Congress, in a rare bipartisan effort, is pushing forward with expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Bush is threatening a veto.

The congressional proposal would renew the program, which is set to expire in September, and expand it with $35 billion in new funding over the next five years paid for by a rise in cigarette taxes, according to the Washington Post.

The popular program currently covers about 7 million children, and the expansion would help states add 3 million or more.

The program provides working families, who cannot afford high insurance premiums or do not have employer-based insurance programs, with low premiums (through Medicaid) and affordable co-pays for their children's health care coverage.

According to US census figures, as many as between 8 and 10 million children went without health care coverage in 2006, so even this proposed expansion may not be enough to cover all uninsured children.

But the program is so popular that staunch opponents of public programs of any type, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), have urged Bush to back off his veto threat. (With the right amount of public pressure on Congress, this issue could forge a veto-proof majority in both Houses.)

Not surprisingly, Democratic governors have vocally supported the congressional effort to expand SCHIP. In a joint statement, 22 Democratic governors said, 'We need SCHIP to provide adequate, predictable, and stable funding and to allow states to design their programs to match their particular needs.'

Progressive supporters of the program, such as the Center for American Progress, say, 'While the funding for the legislation should be criticized, the basis of criticism should be that the bill does too little, not too much, to cover the 6 million uninsured children eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP today.' (Regressive flat taxes like sales taxes force lower income people to carry a disproportionate burden of the costs of the program.)

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, in a recent report, concluded that the SCHIP program as effective and inefficient.

Few, if any, Republican Governors appear to have openly opposed the program or appear to be supporting Bush's veto threat. California Governor Arnold Schwartenegger is on record supporting the expansion of the program. Republican governors of Georgia, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi – none even slightly moderate in their political leanings – have urged expansion as well.

To show off his hard right credentials, for example, Mississippi's Republican Governor Haley Barbour, though he supports expansion, recently boasted about forcing over 3,000 children in his state off of the program.

Ironically, as governor of Texas, Bush also supported a larger SCHIP program for his state.

Bush Admits Serious Flaws in Private Insurance System?

Bush appears to be out in the woods alone on this issue, and his motives, as one might expect, are ideological.

Bush did offer weak – and misleading – resistance to the expansion based on his opposition to new taxes. But because the funding for the expansion would come from a rise in cigarette taxes (a flat tax that conservatives don't ideologically oppose), he had to turn to a more convoluted explanation for his veto threat.

And for those people who support publicly-funded health care coverage programs like S-CHIP or Medicare, Bush's explanation for why he wants to kill the children's insurance program might prove interesting.

'My concern,' Bush was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, 'is that when you expand eligibility ... you're really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government.'

Bush insists that private insurance is better and provides the best medical care available; public programs are inefficient and provide questionable care at best.

So why would people want to leave private insurance? If private insurance is so great, why would working families be lured by something so obviously inferior? Shouldn't people be so 'dependent' on such a perfect private system that they never want to leave it?

It is possible that Bush and his advisers believe working families are stupid or don't care for their children as much as well-off families do.

But if Bush doesn't think this, then his comment suggests some other deep-rooted fear. He is worried that an effective and popular program like S-CHIP might actually be better than private insurance, and he needs to nip it in the bud before it becomes universal.

Indeed, his real problem is that S-CHIP provides working families with a means to afford coverage that doesn't allow private insurance companies to raise premiums arbitrarily or to exclude those people who need coverage the most: the sick.

Because public programs are legislatively mandated, they can't exclude the sick or 'cherry pick' the healthiest, most profitable customers – a common practice in the private market. When it comes to caring for people in a cost-effective manner, private insurance just can't compete.

Look at Medicare, for example. Its administrative costs amount to about 3% of its total budget. By comparison, corporate bureaucracy, costs of advertising, and the demand for maximizing profits push private insurance, medical corporations, and pharmaceutical companies' administrative costs anywhere from more than 4 times that amount to as much as 15 times that.

Indeed, the corporate drive for increasing profits – derived from accidents, pain, disease and illness – is what drives working families off private insurance rolls.

Why Not Expand Public Programs to Cover Everyone?

Bush's biggest fear is that people are starting to say, hey, wait minute! Why not expand public systems like S-CHIP and Medicare to make sure everyone is covered?

This sentiment has been no doubt fueled by the growing popularity of Michael Moore's latest film 'Sicko,' which exposes fundamental flaws in the private insurance system. Just three weeks after its release, the film is the fifth largest grossing documentary ever and has just been expanded to play in 1,200 theaters nationwide.

Congress is on the debate as well. There have been two bills introduced that would expand existing public programs to provide universal coverage.

One is sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and 75 other members of the House. It (H.R. 676) would expand Medicare to provide coverage for all medically necessary procedures and treatments for everyone. The expansion would be paid for by a small increase in Medicare taxes, which, for most individuals, families, and small business owners, would be much less than paying premiums for private insurance. And for big business, the program would eliminate millions even billions in costs for employee insurance programs with one stroke of a pen.

Another plan under consideration by Congress is another version of the 'Medicare-for-All' concept offered by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), which would provide coverage either through Medicare or through the federal government's insurance program, the benefits of which even the staunchest opponents of government-provided coverage in Congress enjoy.

All the shouting about the 'free market' – which in the current health care system costs most people an arm and a leg – just doesn't carry much weight anymore. No wonder Bush is all alone on this one.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at