\jeff{krimmel}

President Bush Hates Poor Children

The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a tool designed to grant federal dollars to match a state’s funding of its own health insurance program for children, was established in 1997 and is set to expire this fall. Before its recess, Congress was in the process of crafting legislation to extend and expand CHIP. President Bush has threatened to veto this legislation, and on top of this threat, his administration set new rules this past Friday aimed at eliminating the plans of many states to expand their own such health insurance programs.

The idea behind all of this is that families living slightly above the poverty level, who don’t qualify for Medicaid or other federal help, yet cannot afford private insurance, need to have a way to provide health insurance for their children. Rather than receiving this help from their own states, President Bush would rather that they just try harder to afford the too expensive private insurance. Harold Meyerson has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post where he says the following:

Even as our president demands that the states monitor the health of insurance companies, the findings on the health of our children make for grim reading. Nearly 9 million American children lack health coverage, a number that rose by 360,000 last year. Deficiencies in childhood diet and medical care are among the leading reasons Americans are falling behind dozens of other nations on indexes of health and height. But we cannot allow our children to receive health coverage that might reduce the private insurers’ market share…

Mr. Meyerson is right. It’s pretty simple: President Bush cares more about the health of private insurance companies than he does about the health of this nation’s impoverished children. That’s compassion for you. We have plenty of federal funds to expand the size of the government in all sorts of other areas, including granting huge government payouts to health insurance companies for prescription drug purchases, but by no means do we have money to match states that want to provide health insurance to their own impoverished children.

What a pathetic, unfunny joke.