Intended Consequences

Most of the outrage over the presidential veto of the truly bipartisan SCHIPs bill has been expressed in strictly moral terms, which is perfectly understandable. Depriving lower income children of health care is immoral. Period. However, a lot of the screaming is also coming from state governments which administer the program and are now faced with some daunting hurdles. California is among those states, as pointed out in this article in today's Sacramento Bee.

Employer-based coverage is decreasing, enrollment in the state's Healthy Families program is increasing and efforts by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats to overhaul the health care system have not yielded a solution a month into a special legislative session.

Moreover, new Bush administration rules would make it harder for California to enroll children from middle-income families in Healthy Families.

"For Schwarzenegger and (Democrats), Healthy Families is a big part of health reform," said Peter Harbage, a consultant who has prepared a study for the California Healthcare Foundation on the possible impact of reduced funding from the federal State Children's Health Insurance Program. ...

Bush, who warned the legislation would lead to socialized medicine by expanding the program to higher-income families, has proposed spending $30 billion, a 20 percent increase over current levels. With increasing medical costs, analysts say that's not enough to maintain current enrollment levels. ...

Healthy Families covers about 831,000 children in California. But another 800,000 children are uninsured, and the Schwarzenegger administration has been counting on an expansion of SCHIP to help cover them.

Schwarzenegger, who lobbied the White House to adopt the congressional proposal, said in a statement that "without additional funding, hundreds of thousands of California children could lose health care coverage."

According to the California Healthcare Foundation study, if SCHIP funding remains at current levels, Healthy Families will run out of money next summer.

First of all, what the moron in the White House conveniently forgets is that "socialized medicine" and "universal health care" are not synonymous terms. The first term refers to government intrusion into the very practice of medicine. The second term refers to access to health care, which should be the right of all Americans under the aegis of the rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Next, as soon as it became obvious that Congress would pass the bill, the President, in a fit of pique which exemplifies his usual meanspiritedness, issued new regulations to the current law which peeled off a whole segment of the California population. Those regulations are currently being challenged by a number of states, and California intends to at least file a brief in the case.

Finally, because of the timing of the veto, California and other states will be hard pressed to keep even the current levels of coverage. The money will run out shortly. More kids will be uninsured.

What must really bite Gov. Schwartzenegger is the fact that he spent time campaigning for the current resident of the White House in Ohio. There's your thanks, Arnold.

In the mean time, the rest of us have to pay.