GOP contenders back Bush on blocking kids’ healthcare

October 5, 2007

Perhaps more than any policy decision this year, the president’s decision to veto expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) was spectacularly dumb. It was bad politics, bad policy, and based on bad reasoning. Lawmakers from both parties, governors from both parties, medical professionals, and children’s’ advocates all agree that Bush’s nonsensical decision does nothing but hurt children.

It’s striking, then, that Bush’s would-be Republican successors all agree with the ridiculous White House line.

If you’ve been following the debate, you no doubt know that practically everything the Bush gang has said about the bipartisan S-CHIP compromise is wrong. If you need a refresher, the WaPo’s usually-mild-mannered Eugene Robinson slammed the president pretty hard today, saying Bush’s veto “should shock the consciences of every American.” He added that the White House’s rationale on the policy is “a pack of flat-out lies.”

But they’re lies that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain happen to believe.

The four leading Republican presidential candidates have aligned themselves with President Bush’s veto on Wednesday of an expanded health insurance program for children, once again testing the political risk of appearing in lock step with a president who has low approval ratings and some critics of the veto within their party. […]

In an interview yesterday on New Hampshire radio, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani framed the insurance program itself as a “typical Democratic, Clinton kind of thing” that substitutes government solutions for private section options.

“Half to two-thirds of the children that they’re going to take care of already have private insurance,” Mr. Giuliani said. “They’re going to move them to the government. It is not just a beginning, it’s a big step in the direction of government-controlled medicine.”

Now, poor Giuliani is a bit of a buffoon, so his nonsensical position isn’t too big a surprise, but we’re talking about a policy in which 72% of Americans, not to mention a significant percentage of congressional Republicans, believe Bush is wrong. Does Frudy McRomney really see a benefit in endorsing the president’s biggest domestic policy blunder of the year?

For what it’s worth, the president, after vetoing S-CHIP, said he’s now open to compromise.

“…I’m more than willing to work with members of both parties from both Houses, and if they need a little more money in the bill to help us meet the objective of getting help for poor children, I’m more than willing to sit down with the leaders and find a way to do so.”

What Bush may or may not understand is that the current, bipartisan S-CHIP bill is already a compromise measure. It’s exactly why it passed with such a strong majority.

It’s also why Harry Reid said yesterday that the president’s new-found interest in a compromise is too little, too late.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) closed the door to negotiations with President Bush on a vetoed children’s health bill Thursday, saying Congress already has given as much ground as it can.

“We’re not going to compromise,” Reid told reporters Thursday. “If he’s hoping for that, he better hope for something else, like getting our troops home from Iraq.”

Reid and other Democratic leaders said it would not be possible to secure House passage for any bill smaller than the $35 billion measure Bush vetoed Wednesday. The House originally proposed spending $50 billion over five years, but Bush has proposed spending only $5 billion in that amount of time. The president said Wednesday that he might be willing to add a “little more money” in talks with Democrats.

Reid flatly rejected that.

“That is an insult — an insult. The House … basically took our position with very few changes. You cannot wring another ounce of compromise out of it,” Reid said. “If he thinks he can waltz in here with his secretary of Health and Human Services and sweet talk us, he can’t. The man’s out of touch with reality.”

If I only had a nickel for every time I heard that sentence in relation to the president….

Collect the video clips, ad people.

I’d like two columns comparing what they felt was worth paying money for, versus what, suddenly, would be fiscally irresponsible, with a running tally beneath both of them. The last two should be the Iraq War vs. children’s health care.

  • Paul Krugman’s most recent column (man, it’s good to be able to quote him again) had an interesting observation about Bush’s ‘compassion’:

    “Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

    By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart.”

    I suspect the same is true for all the current R candidates.

  • “a pack of flat-out lies”?

    I think someone switched our media with a real media. Since when do Republican lies get called “lies”?

    Hopefully when the Republicans roll out next week’s pack of lies, the media will remember that liars usually don’t stop lying. Ever.

  • I guess Rudy would be against allowing people to move from private insurance to Medicare when they were eligible to do so, because that’s exactly what he’s saying about S-CHIP. He’s saying that families who are paying thousands of dollars in premiums they are killing themselves to pay in order to do the right thing and insure their children, are somehow getting over on the taxpayers because they might choose to move to a government-funded plan that same government says they are eligible for. He’s saying that there’s something wrong – is it greed? – with families who just have not been able to afford private insurance, who grab onto the lifeline of a government program they are eligible for.

    He and the other old white men running for the GOP nomination are saying that it is more important to protect the already-rolling-in-profits health insurance companies than it is to protect the health of children. I suppose what they really want is for private insurance companies to get into the business of insuring S-SHIP eligible children – but look no further than the privately-handled Medicare prescription drug program to see how little savings there would be for lower income families.

    They might as well just say it: they are not the party of the people who depend on wages to support themselves, they are the party of the corporations, the private interests and people whose net income is at the top tier. They don’t care about the public good, unless there is money to be made. People can get sick and die from bad food and bad medicine. Infrastructure can crumble and fall apart. Children can suffer lead poisoning from goods not properly screened and inspected. Seniors can go hungry for lack of proper nutrition. Too bad, so sad – it’s not their responsibility to look out for anyone other than themselves.

  • Frudy McRomeny? Really?

    That’s awesome.

    **giggles to self**

    I think my thoughts about this issue were laid out pretty clear in the previous thread.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and ship a case of Rold Gold to the White House …

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  • From the item prior to this one:

    * The nation’s health care spending, public and private, totaled $1.5 trillion when Bush took office. By the time he leaves, it is expected to be $2.6 trillion — a 75 percent increase. Meanwhile, the nation’s number of uninsured has swelled, from 14 percent of the population in 2001 to 16 percent last year, or a total of 47 million people.

    Clearly, the health care marketplace is working.

  • “…half to two thirds already have private health care”???? An out and out lie and nobody calls Guiliani on it? If someone told Rudy that half to two-thirds of the people living in NYC when he was mayor were living in Poverty, Rudy would pull his hair out that someone would lie so outrageously. But here he throws out a blatant lie to support this ridiculous position the president has taken.

    I hope one day our nation has a national single payer not for profit healthcare for everyone keeping people like Guiliani from making a profit off our helath needs. Of course people with millions in the bank want private health ins., it’s no skin off their nose to pay medical expenses. Get used to it Rudy because it is coming…especially if we get Kucinich in there. Big pharm has 4 lobbyists for every congress member…that’s how much profit they have to protect. Health care is about people not profits. Thank God you’ll never be president Rudy.

  • From Schmitz Blitz: schmitzblitz.wordpress.com

    With regard to all of this SCHIP business, the Economist tries to account for the rationale behind the President’s veto, noting:

    Neither fiscal restraint nor the veto pen has characterized President George Bush’s time in the White House. America continues to run a deficit, and Mr. Bush has vetoed only three bills in his whole tenure. But now that he has a Democratic Congress to battle with, the president is promising to be tougher.

    …

    Mr. Greenstein [of the Centre on Budge and Policy Priorities] speculates that the president is really trying to force Congress to attach the health care tax-incentive proposal he unveiled in January. An aversion ot government-run health-care programmes and new taxes—a tobacco-tax increase would fund the SCHIP expansion—may also be driving Mr. Bush’s opposition. Or he may simply be trying to reestablish his credentials as a fiscal conservative

    In adding to Bush’s reasons behind the veto, I argue that moral reasoning also played a role. I base my analysis off of the book Moral Politics by Berkeley Linguistics Professor George Lakoff. Lakoff argues that the liberal/conservative split over key issues is based on more than just partisan politics—he argues that these differences “arise from radically different conceptions of morality and ideal family life—meaning that family and morality are at the heart of American politics.”

    Lakoff offers two structural models for the ideal family—the Strict Father model and the Nurturant Parent model. ‘Conservatives’ tend to prefer the former, ‘liberals’ the latter. From these differing conceptions of the ideal family, arise different moral systems for discerning what is good.

    Lakoff characterizes the Strict Father model as:

    A traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall family policy. He teaches children right from wrong by setting strict rules for their behavior and enforcing them through punishment…He also gains their cooperation by showing love and appreciation when they do follow the rules. But children must never be coddled, lest they become spoiled; a spoiled child will be dependent for life and will not learn proper morals.

    If you accept Lakoff’s thesis, then President Bush’s veto of SCHIP makes perfect sense, assuming he adheres to the Conservative/Strict Father moral worldview (a pretty safe assumption I’d say, noting the President’s deep devotion to a conservative strain of Christianity, which espouse traditional family values).

    The President would see SCHIP as undermining the ‘traditional’ family that his whole moral system is based upon. He would see SCHIP as transferring the responsibility of providing for the family from the father to the government. This diminution of the father’s authority strikes the heart of the Strict Father moral worldview. If this primary tenet is struck, then the whole moral conception loosens and waivers. In vetoing SCHIP, the President may believe that he is maintaining the very foundation his moral system—the authoritarian patriarchal father figure.

  • I’d like to see an increased tax on alcohol to pay for S-Chip, too. Fetal alcohol consumption results in over half of the brain-damage to children born in the US, and it is irreversible. The life-long cost of support is astronomical for each child.

    Just something to think about.

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  • Steve Benen @ Top:

    Perhaps more than any policy decision this year, the president’s decision to veto expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) was spectacularly dumb. […] Lawmakers from both parties, governors from both parties, medical professionals, and children’s’ advocates all agree that Bush’s nonsensical decision does nothing but hurt children.

    It’s striking, then, that Bush’s would-be Republican successors all agree with the ridiculous White House line.

    In the 2000 campaign, after another spectacularly dumb program cut proposal by the Pubes, Bush came out and said, “I don’t agree with balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”

    Now the point here is not to highlight Bush’s own hypocrisy. The man is the King of Liars and Hypocrites, and the contrast between his campaign rhetoric and current actions with respect to SCHIP are just one more example among mulitudes of his eminence in that domain.

    What suprises me, though, is that none of the Republican Presidential front-runners have even the intelligence to follow the example of Bush’s campaign rhetoric, hypocrisy or no. One is led to the conclusion that they are all, just possibly, even stupider than Bush.

    Hard to believe, and a frightening proposition.

  • Elizabeth Schmitz: “In vetoing SCHIP, the President may believe that he is maintaining the very foundation his moral system—the authoritarian patriarchal father figure.”

    Or: he’s just an asshole.

    Not that the two explanations are mutually exclusive.

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