A Stitch in Haste

The now solidly Democratic Congress wasted no time passing a new expansion to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). And President Obama wasted no time signing it:

Since it was created more than 10 years ago, the Children’s Health Insurance Program has been a lifeline for millions of children whose parents work full time and don’t qualify for Medicaid, but through no fault of their own don’t have — and can’t afford — private insurance. For millions of children who fall into that gap, CHIP has provided care when they’re sick and preventive services to help them stay well. This legislation will allow us to continue and build on these successes.

Of course, even if one takes as a given that it is either proper or moral to do good works with funds you seize from others by force, the subsequent question still remains: If there is a “Medicaid gap,” then why not just expand Medicaid? Why establish an entirely new entitlement and bureaucracy?

The answer of course is one of perception, and delusion. SCHIP is packaged and marketed as a middle-class entitlement. Lower middle class, perhaps, but middle class nonetheless.

Medicaid, on the other hand, is the dole. And the Prime Taboo of Politics is that no middle class entitlement must ever be allowed to hint of being the dole (cf., Social Security).

So instead of the simple and straightforward approach — expand Medicaid — the politicians craft an entire new middle class entitlement, that it can expand without any fear of stigma from those voters whose support the politicians are trying to buy.

I exposed this fraudulent packaging of SCHIP expansion back in September 2007:

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No wonder class warriors such as John Edwards and Barack Obama are so incensed. Just look at the absolute squalor now spreading across America:

Lori and Steven Siravo earn $56,000 a year and say they can’t afford health insurance.

They consider themselves lucky to live in New Jersey, where the family’s income isn’t too high to qualify their 16-year-old daughter, Carlie, for U.S. government-subsidized coverage under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
…
Steven, 49, drives a Chevrolet Caprice Classic that’s almost 20 years old, and she drives a 5-year-old Chevy Monte Carlo. The above-ground pool out back is 17 years old, bought when “we had money” before Carlie was born, Lori said.

The one luxury is a full-size pinball machine Steven bought for his wife on her 40th birthday.

The family’s monthly bills consume most of their take-home income. Pulling out her checkbook, Lori said there’s the mortgage ($1,500), utilities ($743), phones and Internet service ($200), car insurance and gasoline ($205), property taxes ($230), basic cable television ($48), food ($600) and credit-card payments ($325) on an outstanding $11,000 balance. That’s $46,212 a year, not including clothes, school books and extra-curricular activities for Carlie.
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There’s also $352 a month on a home-equity loan the Siravos took out to send Carlie to a private Catholic high school.

Read that again: Apparently “poverty in America” now means having “only” two cars, “only” basic cable, “only” an above-ground pool and “only” a private education. Oh, and “only” one pinball machine.

If that’s your (deprived) lifestyle, then you are, to SCHIP apologists, “poor” and in need of health insurance welfare underwritten by other people’s taxes.

This is what Democrats decry as “poverty in America.” These are the people to whom President Bush is being “cruel” by threatening a veto of SCHIP expansion. These are the miserable, contemptible, utterly hopeless forty-something whiner-brats who lay claim to other people’s income, insisting that — their words — “life is stressful enough without worrying about your health.”

Or, apparently, worrying about being middle-class leeches on other taxpayers.

Just to be clear, this family is not “uninsurable.” They have access to typical, ordinary private health insurance. They choose, however, to opt — immorally if not irrationally — to enroll in SCHIP for less than one-third the cost of private, middle-class health insurance. Behold “enlightened” socialized medicine schemes — corrupting otherwise reasonable people into becoming welfare bums.

Madness. Sheer madness.

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Back to the present, Tax Policy Blog explains how the SCHIP expansion: (1) entices families who do in fact have private health insurance to abandon it for “not the dole” government health insurance, and (2) reflects a unapologetically broken campaign promise by President Obama not to raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000 per year. “Change we can believe in”?

Previously:
–Should We Worry About SCHIP Mission Creep?
–Is SCHIP Analogous to Public Schools?

Filed under: Activist Legislators & Nanny Statists, Fiscal Federalism, Socialized Medicine