Following up on an earlier item, the president’s decision to veto a bipartisan bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is scandalous, but it’s not without a foundation. Bush didn’t just reject the expansion out of some kind of craven disgust for children’s health; he’s offered specific policy rationales for rejecting the legislation.
The problem, of course, is that these rationales happen to be spectacularly wrong.
McClatchy, arguably the best source for fact-checking in the mainstream media, takes note of some of the other bogus claims opponents of the bill are making. For example, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has repeatedly argued that the proposal was put together without input from Republicans. McClatchy’s Steven Thomma and Tony Pugh explained, “That isn’t true. Senior Republicans such as Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a fiscal conservative, and Orrin Hatch of Utah helped draft the bill.”
One of the White House’s favorite talking points, meanwhile, is that the S-CHIP expansion is so overly generous, it will cover children in households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year. That’s wrong, too.
The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state’s Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.
States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush’s Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.
Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn’t change it.
I try not to imagine what our democracy would be like if every major media outlet did fact-checking like this every day. It’s just too overwhelming.
McClatchy’s report added one administration claim that isn’t bogus.
The president also claims that the proposal would cause some families to drop private coverage and enroll their children in the cheaper SCHIP program.
That’s true.
Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said that was inevitable to some degree when any government program expanded. The CBO estimates that the legislation would attract 5.8 million new enrollees by 2012. Of them, 3.8 million would be uninsured and eligible under current requirements, and 2 million probably would have had private coverage before the expansion.
That’s a rate of about 1 in 3 new enrollees dropping private insurance. “We don’t see very many other policy options that would reduce the number of uninsured children by the same amount without creating more” dropouts from private insurance, Orszag said.
In other words, Bush is right about the likely consequence, but it’s not a good reason to veto a bill that helps millions of kids have access to medical care.
The president emphasized one other talking point today while rationalizing his veto: “[T]he policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage.” Jonathan Cohn suggested even this is suspect.
Really? I always thought the idea, first and foremost, was to get people decent health insurance — regardless of who’s running it. And apparently I’m not alone. A great many conservatives voted for this measure, not because they’re dying to have government more involved in health care but because they want kids covered and are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
The House Republican leadership — which is standing behind their president — says they have enough votes to sustain Bush’s veto. That’s too bad. And I’m not really sure how this plays out in terms of future negotiations. The White House is signaling its willingness to compromise, but the bill Congress sent him was already a compromise. The original House measure was a lot more generous. Bush, meanwhile, continue to tout his own proposal — which, because of its meager funding, would actually result in states forcing kids off the S-CHIP rolls.
As for political strategy, Big Tent Democrat makes the case that Dems should keep sending the White House the same bill, over and over again. Fortunately, the Democratic leadership, should the veto override come up short, plan to do exactly that.