Editor's Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) voted against overriding George W. Bush's veto of the S-CHIP reauthorization bill. Mr. Upton voted for the override. The version below reflects the correction.
Sensing imminent victory, congressional Democrats are preparing to send a second S-CHIP reauthorization bill to the president's desk within the next week or two, says political news website Politico.
According to the website, House Democrats will vote this week on a slightly revised version of the S-CHIP bill vetoed earlier this month by the Bush administration. 154 Republicans blocked an override vote just last week.
And following up on their vow to continue to hold responsible those who blocked passage of the popular children's health care program, a coalition of labor, advocacy, and faith community groups is targeting Republicans with TV and radio ads on the issue.
Under the banner of the Campaign to Save Children's Healthcare, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, MoveOn.org, Americans United for Change, USAction, TrueMajority, Catholics United, Campaign for America’s Future, MomsRising, ACORN have joined their financial and organizational forces to help win passage of S-CHIP.
According to a press release from USAction, that organization and MoveOn.org Political Action have ads up targeting Reps. Marilyn Musgrave (CO-04), Randy Kuhl (NY-29), Tim Walberg, (MI-07), Ric Keller (FL-08), Tom Feeney (FL-24) and Sam Graves (MO-06).
Additional e-mail campaigns, telephone calls, and key congressional office visits are also being organized in numerous other congressional districts to pressure opponents of the bill to vote this time for children's health care.
Recent media reports have suggested that key Republicans in the House have already warned that Bush's veto victory was short lived. Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) told the New York Times that "[Bush] is not going to get away with it."
Other insiders speculated that a second, modified S-CHIP bill would pass. According to the latest media accounts, the new version of the bill would cover the children of working families making up to 300% of poverty, which for a family of four in the US totals just over $61,000. It would provide in total $35 billion over the next five years to expand coverage to up to 10 million uninsured children.
One Michigan Republican, Rep. Fred Upton, who voted to override George W. Bush's veto of the previous bill has already signaled that some Republicans may have a change in heart, telling the New York Times, "the changes would improve the bill and would pick up Republican votes."
While the Bush administration appears to be saying that this new version of the bill still does not go far enough to exclude enough of the uninsured children of working families, some critical supporters of the S-CHIP concept will probably see the new version as containing some major imperfections.
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For example, National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy described as "shameful" the Congressional decision to drop from the original version "coverage for legal immigrant children in hopes of avoiding the veto pen."
The new version will continue to exclude the children of undocumented immigrant families (children, for crying out loud), and will impose severe background checks on families who cannot immediately prove citizenship.
Again hard-working immigrant families and citizen families who earn just enough not to qualify for the new rules but clearly not enough to afford adequate coverage for their children will fall prey to demagoguery and partisan politics.
Though the S-CHIP program is a far cry from universal care and can be only a stop-gap measure for working families – because, contrary to Bush and Republican demagoguery, it doesn't remove the profit motive from health care – it is a good step toward making sure kids get to see the doctor when they get sick.
While the Republicans and the White House bicker over arithmetic to save political face and to prop up their unpopular ideology of forcing working families to fend for themselves without access to health care in the name of the private market and private insurance companies, some hundreds of thousands of children will go without regular and reliable access to a doctor.
