Some folks don’t believe government-run health care will work — even when it already is working.
Way back in the 1990s, then-Louisiana Sen. John Breaux was accosted in an airport by an elderly woman who pleaded, “Senator, don’t you dare let the government get its hands on my Medicare!”
To paraphrase Rick from “Casablanca,” she was misinformed.
Nevertheless, Breaux, always the gentleman, replied congenially, “Don’t worry, madam, I won’t.”
That’s a small illustration of how successful conservatives and the health insurance industry have been at demonizing anything that sounds like “government-run health care.”
How did President Bush hold off attempts by the Democrat-run House to override his veto of a popular children’s health-insurance bill? He called it a foot in the door to “government-run health care.”
He says that like it’s a bad thing. In fact, as the Breaux anecdote illustrates, the public has been very supportive of Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, for children whose family income is too high for Medicaid but too low to afford private coverage. Nevertheless, the president and his allies are reduced to reminding people that, “Pssst, it’s government health care so you’re supposed to be afraid of it.”
More Top Picks Best Laptops
That argument failed to prevent Congress from passing a bill to expand SCHIP by about 3.4 million children to cover 10 million. A healthy majority of lawmakers refused to believe that key Republican backers of the bill like Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah somehow had become socialists.
Nevertheless, despite Bush’s abysmally low approval ratings in the polls, the White House still flexed enough muscle last week to prevent an override veto.
The SCHIP arguments from Bush, the insurance industry and their allies seemed to change almost as much as the administration’s Iraq policy. The bill’s opponents really, really do want to insure more kids, they said, but the Democrats’ bill was offering coverage to families that were making too much money. It’s a good thing those folks weren’t in charge when the idea of public schools was first debated or parents over a certain income bracket these days might have to send their kids to private academies.
Bush and others also threw around misleading figures, saying, for example, that children with family incomes as high as $83,000 could qualify for SCHIP under the bill Bush vetoed. But that figure, it turns out, is one that was requested by New York, one of the world’s most expensive places to live, and turned down by the Bush administration. As Hatch, a backer of Bush but also a key architect of the bill Bush vetoed, said, “about 92 percent” of the kids in the program will be under 200 percent of the poverty level. The poverty level for a family of four is $20,650. They’re covered by Medicaid. The SCHIP program’s upper limit would be about half the $83,000 Bush used, yet he tossed around the larger number as if it were mandatory.
It turns out that the bipartisan bill that Bush vetoed covers precisely the group that Bush says he wants to help. He should. All he has to do is get out of the way.
In the larger health-care debate that’s shaping up in this presidential campaign season, what’s really intriguing about Bush’s argument is his fear that providing SCHIP for working families might crowd out private insurers.
That’s an ironic position for conservatives who tout the virtue of choice. The Bush administration appears to favor the right of consumers to have a choice of insurance providers, unless their choice happens to be the government-run choice.
For whom, we might ask, do lawmakers speak when they rush to protect private insurers from having to compete for your consumer dollar? Here’s a hint: They are not speaking for the insured.
Sure, Medicare and other government insurance programs have their problems. No plan is perfect. You get what you pay for. But the holes in private insurance coverage are growing large enough to turn nice folks, like the woman Breaux encountered, into angry militants at the thought of losing their government-run insurance, even if they don’t realize that it’s government-run.
———-
E-mail: [email protected]