Suffer the Little Children...

If being "pro" (as opposed to "anti") -American means going along with and supporting the president of an administration that has no "philosophical" problem with the killing of thousands of children in Iraq (it is estimated that 46% of this body count is children under 15), while at the same time in this country, this same man...

objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children's Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.

About 3.3 million additional children would be covered under the proposal developed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), among others. It would provide the program $60 billion over five years, compared with $30 billion under Bush's proposal.

This program, usually referred to by its acronym SCHIP,is not a new one, it has been around for ten years, and helps provide health coverage to 6.6 million low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance on their own. In other words, children whose parents are working three jobs in order to pay rent, put food on the table and buy their kids shoes, so they don't meet the criteria for Medicaid, but their jobs at Taco Bueno, Wendy's and cleaning suburban houses don't offer any family insurance either, and they sure don't have anything left over to pay for private health insurance. The program would mostly be funded by a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, to $1 a pack, which Bush calls "a tax hike" and also opposes. On what philosophical grounds would that opposition be, I wonder? Could it have anything to do with the Big Tobacco lobby, do you suppose?

His philosophical difficulty with the program seems to be that it would take money away from the, hmmmmm, insurance industry. The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Cancer Society support the increase. But the administration, which consistently refers to SCHIP as government-run health care, says billions of dollars in insurance costs will be shifted from the private sector to the federal government under the Senate proposal.(Boston Globe)

His real problem is how out of touch he is with all reality, in this instance the fact that many Americans are not able to pay the insurance costs in the private sector, and so thousands of American children will go uninsured and uncaredfor without the extension and expansion of this program. For more perspective on financial reality in Bush War World, check this out: The impressive numbers on the cost of the war (so far) vs how many kids could have been insured for that same money.

go ahead, call me anti-American, or anti-Bush, or whatever you want to...I call this philosophy short-sighted, clearly aimed at protecting big business at the expense of the children of our poorer citizens. the next generation of American workers, voters, professionals, military, in short: Americans. There is virtually nothing about this administration that I can support, behind which I can rally. This is not the America I have loved, this is not an America of which I can be proud.

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children GWBush, State Children's Health Ins Program veto

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