On October 3, 2007 President George W. Bush, vetoed only his 4th piece of legislation. The bill that he halted wasn’t for some kind of bi-partisan agenda, it was a health care bill designed to extend the SCHIP program.
SCHIP is designated to grant insurance to low income families that either cannot afford insurance and is not provided for by an employer. In its current form only kids in households of families that make $17,000 a year can qualify. The proposed new bill would have extend that to a large number, including children in a household up to $83,000 but supporting most at less than $40,000 dollar range.
The rhetoric that the President used as his basis to veto the bill, was that the health care industry would move from private industry to a completely government run system. This would hurt the private sector by eliminating a whole sector of the healthcare industry. Sabastian Mallaby of the Washington Post brings up some very interesting numbers to quite the contrary, and while the article is prior to the veto the information is still relevant due to a possible congress override of the veto, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093001035.html).
The President said that Millions of kids would leave private insurance to go to the State funded programs. The reality is that about 10 million uninsured would now have the health care they need, that’s about 2/3 of the eligible. The other 1/3 has gaps in their current coverage that could be filled by SCHIP. The other fact is that private companies administer the benefits, and patients will still see private doctors and nurses.
Bush also believes that people should be held accountable for their own health and if they can rely on government than they don’t have to do that. Mallaby makes good points about people in socialized healthcare countries actually live longer than here in the United States, but let’s step away from that. The bigger issue is that this bill only affects kids and no matter what reality TV will tell us these kids can’t take care of themselves. Under the law kids aren’t held accountable for most actions, and they can’t be made to have to make decisions such as how to take care of themselves, what drugs they should be taking if they are sick.
The bottom line is that the President vetoed a bill designed to help a segment of our population that can’t help themselves, and due to the outrageous cost of healthcare their families can’t provide either. It is my hopes that Bush can sleep well at night knowing that he has no problem spending billions of dollars on a war for people in another country but can’t allocate 35 million to help kids in his own.
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