Bush Vetoes S-CHIP Bill

President Bush vetoed (as promised) the health care bill that would have increased the program to cover "children" as old as 25 and families making as much as $80,000 per year. The Dems promoted the bill claimed it would add 4 million children to the federal program but neglected to mention that 2.4 million of those kids already have health care insurance through their families. All it would have done for those kids is shift the cost burden from the private sector to the government taxpayer.

The president has indicated a willingness to approve an expanded program, but only one that helps more poor kids and is not such a careless expansion of the federal government.

So why the push to expand the program to include people who don't need it or aren't even children? Let's go to the Way Back Machine courtesy of The Politico:

In the battle of sound bites over President Bush’s expected veto of the children’s health insurance bill, the White House position boils down to this: Beware, beware — it’s the first step toward federalized health care.

Nonsense, say supporters from both sides of the aisle , who swear they would never vote for a bill that was the proverbial camel’s nose under a tent on government-run health care.

But a look back at the fine print of the 1993 “Hillarycare” debacle shows there may be a grain of truth in the Republican suspicions — and also demonstrates that the GOP believes there is still significant political power to be mined from one of the Clinton administration’s greatest political and tactical failures.

Back in 1993, according to an internal White House staff memo, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff saw federal coverage of children as a “precursor” to universal coverage.

In a section of the memo titled “Kids First,” Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed.

And one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured.

That idea sounds a lot like the current State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was eventually created by the Republican Congress in 1997.

“Under this approach, health care reform is phased in by population, beginning with children,” the memo says. “Kids First is really a precursor to the new system. It is intended to be freestanding and administratively simple, with states given broad flexibility in its design so that it can be easily folded into existing/future program structures.”

Creating a federal health care program for poor kids is the first step in the incremental program to bring socialized medicine to the United States. With each revision more and more people will be included, each with some heart-rending explanation for their worthiness, and all the while we'll keep creeping toward the takeover of 1/7th of our economy by the government...just like Hillary Clinton planned in 1993.