Articles
Washington Post: House Passes Children's Health Bill
09/26/2007
A broad House majority gave final approval last night to a
$35 billion expansion of the popular children's health insurance program, with
members from both parties brushing aside a stern veto threat from President
Bush to vote their support, 265 to 159.
The Senate will take up the bill later this week and is
expected to send it to the president with a veto-proof, bipartisan majority.
But amid furious White House lobbying, even Republican advocates in the House
ruefully conceded that they will probably fall short of the 290 votes they will
need next week to override the promised veto.
"I think it's a
heavy lift," said Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a perennial political
target of the Democrats who worked hard for the bill's passage yesterday.
"The administration has come to this debate very late, and, as a result,
they're asking us to take one for the team here."
Last night, 45 Republicans voted for the bill -- more than
Republican supporters had expected and a sharp jump from the five who supported
the original House version in August. Eight Democrats voted against it.
The compromise package would expand the $5 billion-a-year
children's health insurance program by an average of $7 billion a year over the
next five years, for total funding of $60 billion over the period. That would
be enough to boost the program's enrollment to 10 million, up from 6.6 million,
and dramatically reduce the ranks of
"What we're hoping to do is to galvanize the support of
the American people behind this legislation," said House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.). "The president will find himself alone."
Indeed, the compromise worked out between the House and the
Senate has garnered the support of the health insurance industry, AARP, the
American Medical Association, governors from both parties and a platoon of
children's health advocates.
But Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push
children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed
health care, while creating an "entitlement" whose costs would
ultimately outstrip the money raised by the bill's 61-cent increase in the
federal tobacco tax.
"The current bill goes too far toward federalizing
health care and turns a program meant to help low-income children into one that
covers children in some households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year,"
asserted the White House yesterday, continuing to push Bush's far more modest
$5 billion expansion.
Backers of the congressional bill, including conservative
Republican Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (
But both sides have dug in. Moderate Republicans openly
fretted yesterday that the White House had made the House GOP its firewall, to
their political detriment. "I'm a little baffled as to why the Bush people
picked this issue to fight it out on," said Rep. Ray LaHood (
Joining LaHood in voting for the bill were several
Republican moderates, including Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (
The measure would make it very difficult for states to cover
children at higher than three times the poverty level, or $51,510 for a family
of three, analysts said. About 70 percent of the children who retain or gain
coverage under the bill would be from families earning less than twice the
poverty level, or $34,340 for a family of three, according to Genevieve M.
Kenney, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.
Throughout the day, both sides lobbed rhetorical strikes,
each accusing the other of playing politics with children's health. Republicans
attacked the bill on multiple fronts, saying it would move the nation toward
"socialized medicine," ease access to Medicaid for illegal immigrants,
and lavish "pork-barrel" spending on a few lucky states and
districts.
"This is a government-run socialized wolf masquerading
in the sheep skin of children's health," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling
(R-Tex.).
The bill's fine print does raise indigent health-care
reimbursements to
But Democrats said that such issues could hardly compete
with the central goal of the bill. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (
"It's about the priorities, and the president has told
us his priorities," Emanuel said.
Briefly, there was a human face to the issue on Capitol Hill
yesterday when Bonnie Frost, a
When Gemma and her brother Graeme, 12, suffered traumatic
brain injuries in a car accident in 2004, SCHIP made it possible for them to
get the medical care that they needed, Frost said.