A Stitch in Haste

A New York Times editorial assures us that fears of “mission creep” within an expanded SCHIP program are unfounded:

To hear the Bush administration tell it, expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program would entice hordes of families to drop their private coverage and put their children on the public dole. As the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael Leavitt, argued in a recent television appearance, states that cover middle-income children as well as the poor are essentially telling people to “cancel your private insurance and we’ll have the government pay for it.”

The Times then points to a Congressional Budget Office study that concludes that “only” two million children (!) currently covered by or eligible for private insurance would be lured into this new middle class entitlement.

Of course, history shows — over and over and over — that, when evaluating federal programs, mission creep should always be the default assumption. For example:

–The first income tax (after the Sixteenth Amendment took effect) “only” applied to incomes over $500,000 and was capped at a 7% rate. Fewer than 1% of Americans had to pay any federal income tax at first. Now the income tax is paid by roughly half the population and reaches as much as 35% of marginal income.

–The first Alternative Minimum Tax applied “only” to 155 hyper-rich families who would otherwise have paid no federal income tax whatsoever. It will soon apply, if left unchecked, to the entire American middle class.

–Social Security (insanely described by liberals as “the most successful government economic program in history”) initially “only” taxed 2% of income and was capped at “only” $3,000. It now confiscates one-eighth of most workers’ entire paychecks.

–A “temporary” 3% tax was imposed on long-distance telephone service “only” to fund the Spanish-American War. It was not repealed until last year — 108 years after the five-month war ended.

–Similarly, three generations after the Great Depression, the federal government still sees a need for taxpayer-funded rural electrification programs, farm subsidies, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and countless other leftover New Deal zombie-ocracies. No mission creep in any of that, apparently.

–PBS was established when there were exactly three homogeneous broadcast networks. Now that 300 astoundingly diverse television channels (or more) is the norm, politicians and bureaucrats consider PBS to be — still absolutely vital. Somehow.

–One word: Amtrak.

Add you own examples in the comments.

So to think that SCHIP will somehow be different, that it will forever avoid mission creep and could never expand even further into a “teaser rate” for socialized medicine, is either unforgivably naive or unforgivably disingenuous.

Not that it makes much difference which.

We already have a health care safety net for the poor in this country — Medicaid. To the extent that Medicaid is failing in its mission to cover poor children, it should be fixed. That would be an acceptable form of “mission creep.” But Medicaid should not be supplemented by a duplicative, politically loaded, warm-fuzzy-feeling middle-class entitlement that would, intentionally or otherwise, almost certainly lure self-sufficient households to suckle at the teat of socialized medicine.

More thoughts at From On High.

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• Socialized Medicine: What’s In a Name? Or a Dichotomy?
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