Bush Won’t Expand Health Care For Children
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Health Care, Legislation, Money
He says the bi-partisan proposal to expand the program is against his fiscal philosophy.
*sigh*
President Bush yesterday rejected entreaties by his Republican allies that he compromise with Democrats on legislation to renew a popular program that provides health coverage to poor children, saying that expanding the program would enlarge the role of the federal government at the expense of private insurance.The president said he objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.
“I support the initial intent of the program,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post after a factory tour and a discussion on health care with small-business owners in Landover. “My concern is that when you expand eligibility . . . you’re really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government.”
The 10-year-old program, which is set to expire on Sept. 30, costs the federal government $5 billion a year and helps provide health coverage to 6.6 million low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance on their own.
So he’s okay spending untold hundreds of billions on a prescription drug plan, but he won’t dig and find an additional $30 billion for kids?
Yet again, the man’s decisions don’t make any sense to me.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 and is filed under Health Care, Legislation, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
You’re not alone Justin, most people “don’t get it” when it comes to Bush. It’s not about demonizing Bush, it’s about the facts as reality sees it. The fact is that Bush is corrupt. Bush is for big business and he is selling out the majority of Americans. No amount of word smithing or White House press conferences with Tony Snow or any of the other Bush crony telling us otherwise is going to change that.
Cute Texas slang doesn’t make me feel better about global warming, Katrina, Iraq or health care. Exxon Mobile, Haliburton, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture and the defense industry are feeling just fine about cute Texas slang.
I venture to guess these people don’t hold cute Texas slang as highly though:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_numbers.html
These are real Americans, not some head of a multi-billion dollar multi-national company that has no allegiance to America’s welfare or its tax laws. A person who vacations in Kennebunkport, Maine in his 24 million dollar yatch whose idea of medical care is a personalized dietician/trainer and “life-style” coach. Most Americans could only dream of that kind of medical care. A great deal will have to settle for going to the “ER” to be treated because they have a “primary care physician.” They do however, have a primary job with primary bills and a primary mortgage on top of that primary lack of cash flow.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Is this the health care bill that is partly funded by a 20,000% tax increase on cigars?
July 19th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
No Jimmy, it’s the health care bill that will be fully funded by the IOU left to us for the cost of the Iraq war. The cigar tax will fully fund the tax refunds for the richest 1% of Americans though.
July 19th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Jeremy, it’s not really accurate to say that Bush is merely for big business. Bush could care less about big business per se. What he care about are the sources of income/wealth of his cronies. If that happens to be a big bu8siness in some cases, he’ll be for that business. But if you’ve got a big business which doesn’t happen to make a major contribution to the wealth of Bush or one of his friends, forget about anything like fair treatment, let alone a favor. Not from this bunch.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:00 am
I don’t know. If this is the exact thing profiled on the NewsHour some of these “poor kids” targeted by this expansion were in families making $50-60,000 a year. I’ll admit Bush EVER claiming he’s agaisnt “big government” is a joke (and an unfunny one at that), but that doesn’t mean this program was well put together. Are actual poor people so well taken care of that we can just subsidize the middle class now?
July 20th, 2007 at 10:25 am
WHAT THE FUCK!? Thank you Jimmy for bringing this tyranny to my attention, sincerely. I have been out of it lately. This will simply kill the cigar industry. No, it will turn the entire cigar industry into a black market. This tax will hurt poor people severely. It will entirely destroy villages in South and Central America (full of poor children, Jeremy). Immoral, tyranical, outrageous. Whether one agrees or not with providing universal healthcare for children, I think that we all can agree that it should not be provided by starving little hispanic kids.