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The SCHIP On Bush's Shoulder

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By GRACE-MARIE TURNER

Published: October 15, 2007

Is President Bush a liar who hates children? That's what many of his critics now are asking in the opinion pages of major newspapers across the country. Why else, they say, would he refuse to sign a bill providing health insurance to poor kids?

Specifically, the president has vetoed a bill expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), designed to provide health coverage to lower-income children. One nationally syndicated columnist went so far as to call Bush's rationale in vetoing the bill a 'pack of flat-out lies.'

This kind of rhetoric is wrong and misleads readers about the facts of this important issue.

There is no debate over whether to reauthorize the SCHIP program so it can continue to provide insurance to needy children. That's a given. The debate is about whether children in middle-income families should be added.

The president is absolutely right in insisting that SCHIP focus on its core mission of needy children. When SCHIP was created in 1997, the target population was children whose parents earned too much to qualify them for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance. The president wants the program to focus on children whose families earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In today's dollars, that's $41,300 a year.

About two-thirds of the nation's uninsured children already are eligible for either Medicaid or SCHIP but aren't enrolled. Raising the income threshold won't solve this core problem. Congress should require states to focus on the 689,000 children the Urban Institute says are uninsured and would be eligible for SCHIP if eligibility were limited to the $41,300 income level.

No one doubts that SCHIP is a vitally important program for needy children. And that our nation needs to do a better job of helping working families afford health insurance. But giving the states incentives to add middle-income kids to their SCHIP rolls will prompt families to replace private insurance with taxpayer-provided coverage.

This is completely backwards. The goal of SCHIP should be to provide private coverage to uninsured children. If Congress would send the president a bill that does that, he says he would sign it in a minute.

Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a non-profit research organization focusing on free-market solutions to health reform.

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