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In his radio address on Sunday, President Bush promised to veto a bipartisan compromise to expand “the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a joint federal-state funding program that provides vital health insurance coverage for children in families whose income levels render them ineligible for either Medicaid or private insurance.
The proposal, which would be financed by “a 61-cent-per-pack increase in the tobacco tax,” boosts “current levels of spending by $35 billion over the next five years” to “expand enrollment from 6.6 million children to about 10 million children.”
In his veto threat, Bush claimed that the bipartisan compromise would “raise taxes on working Americans” and complained that the expansion would add “nonpoor children to the program” and encourage “many to drop private coverage, to go on the government-subsidized program.”
Despite Bush’s claims, “the overwhelming majority of children who would gain health coverage under the emerging agreement are precisely the low-income children the President says he wants to focus on.” A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the SCHIP bill “found that at least 85 percent of the otherwise-uninsured children who would gain coverage under the bill have incomes below states’ current SCHIP eligibility limits;” two-thirds of “those who gain SCHIP coverage…would otherwise be uninsured.”
Since SCHIP needs “14 billion more over the next five years to keep covering current enrollees, let alone reach more of the nation’s nearly 9 million uninsured children,” Bush’s willingness to pony up just $5 billion is “tantamount to a cut.” Bush’s plan of providing “tax breaks for the purchase of private insurance,” would cover less than one-quarter of the uninsured, according to an analysis by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.
As for the alleged tax increase on cigarettes, a recent study found that “higher state taxes on smokers have produced sharp declines in consumption.” Economist Frank Chaloupka of the University of Illinois predicts that “smoking will drop 6% if the 61-cent-per-pack tax hike is passed.” “I expect a bigger drop than almost anything we’ve seen before,” he says.
When Bush accepted the 2004 GOP nomination for president he promised that “in a new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for government health insurance programs. We will not allow a lack of attention, or information, to stand between these children and the health care they need.” Now, Bush has gone back on his word, placing the profits of big tobacco and a conservative fiscal theology ahead of children’s health care and well being.
UPDATE: ThinkProgress notes that Bush is refusing to spend an extra $22 billion on veterans health care, infrastructure improvements, education but plans to ask Congress next week “to approve another massive spending measure — totaling nearly $200 billion — to fund the [Iraq] war through next year.”
So I guess if President Bush had signed the bill you could have posted that he broke his 2004 campaign promise never to raise taxes. Nice. It is veto threats like this that cut the budget deficit in half during the last two years of Republican congressional control. Now, with Pelosi as speaker he actualy has to veto such spending. Tough, but responsible. We have a government that doles out a trillion dollars every year in social spending. Who else can say that? Nobody.