Well isn’t this swell?
Forty House Republicans voted for SCHIP today (which included a huge tax hike), including freshmen Steve Austria of Ohio (who voted for former Gov. Taft’s huge tax hike in the state legislature), Leonard Lance of New Jersey, Erik Paulsen of Minnesota, Chris Lee of New York, Glenn Thompson of PA, and Anh Cao of Louisiana.
Full list can be found here.
The bill was described by the AP as such:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has opened debate on a bill to increase spending on children’s health insurance as Democrats try to give President-elect Barack Obama an early win on health care.
The bill includes an additional $33 billion for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next 4 1/2 years. The federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes will increase 61 cents to pay for the program’s expansion.
Democratic lawmakers say that with the struggling economy, it’s more important than ever to cover children’s health care.
Legislation to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program was vetoed twice by President George W. Bush in 2007. This time, supporters are confident that a deal can be struck and the bill passed shortly after Obama’s inauguration.
The measure includes a provision that would expand coverage to children of legal immigrants as well as pregnant immigrants.
Of course they fail to mention the fact that it covers “children” up to the age of 30. Yes, that is THIRTY YEARS OLD! Let’s not forget about the coverage for illegals…wouldn’t want the lawbreakers left out would we?
Currently SCHIP, along with Medicaid, insure 45% of all children in America. This plan is supposed to expand that number close to 100% by ensuring that private insurance providers get crowded out by providing a huge incentive to those holding private insurance. Whats the incentive? They don’t have to pay. Their neighbors have to pay with their taxes but hey, it “seems” free right?
Jeff Emanuel notes that Hawii tried this, and it failed:
This massive expansion of taxpayer-funded health coverage cannot and will not work, as recent examples have clearly shown. Take Hawaii, for instance. In March, the Aloha State implemented a program called “Keiki Care,” which was ostensibly designed to provide health insurance to children whose parents’ income was too high to qualify for Medicaid (over $73,000) but too low to afford private coverage. The result of this coverage offering was an avalanche of private policyholders dumping their insurance coverage and enrolling in the “free” program, crowding out private insurers and so overwhelming Keiki Care that Gov. Linda Lingle (R) was forced to close the doors on the entire program only seven months after its inception.
“People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for ‘free,’” said Dr. Kenny Fink, an administrator for Hawaii’s Department of Human Services.
In all, a staggering 85% of children enrolled in Keiki Care had previously been enrolled in private insurance programs, which their parents had dropped like a hot rock when given the opportunity to have their neighbors pay for their children’s health coverage instead of doing so out of pocket. Seeing this, Lingle correctly judged that, in the face of massive budget shortfalls and a staggering economy, using taxpayer dollars to provide health insurance for people who already have it was not the best direction for the state of Hawaii to take.
And he describes the bold faced lie in this bill. That being the funding will come on the backs of smokers:
The SCHIP legislation currently being debated by Congress seeks to fund the massive program expansion through billions in new tobacco taxes. The tendency on the part of state and federal governments to shift an ever-growing portion of their funding base onto the backs of smokers, while simultaneously claiming the purpose of this “sin” tax is to encourage smokers to quit the habit, is a Catch-22 of such comedic proportions that only government could actually take such actions and make such claims with a straight face.
In fact, the SCHIP expansion proposed by Congressional Democrats will actually require almost 23 million non-smoking Americans to “pick up the habit” in order to provide all the funding needed to pay for the program — and that is according to conservative estimates.
The number of tobacco users in the U.S. has been declining, not increasing, in recent years. This means that, with this legislation, Congress is attempting to expand a struggling program by tying it, through regressive tax increases, to a declining revenue stream which is disproportionately made up of lower-income and indigent Americans.
While its funding base declines, and America’s working poor are forced to shoulder more of the burden for a health care program ostensibly created to insure their children, the costs associated with SCHIP will continue to rise, likely more than doubling (according to Congressional Budget Office figures) as a direct result of this proposal. Ironically, this increased burden will be placed on the poor to foot the bill for providing health insurance so bad that they don’t even want it to people who are several rungs higher on the economic ladder than they.
And still, 40 Republicans voted for this tax increase.
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There is little point in House Republicans even showing up for work for at least the next two years. They really should have cut McCain loose and focused on the House and Senate races like they did with Dole.
Why work when the pies and health insurance is free.