10-22-07, 12:56 pm
Hard line Republicans in the House of Representative last week cheered after blocking an effort to override George W. Bush's veto of a children's health care bill by a margin of about a dozen votes.
Their exclamations of triumph were plainly audible on C-SPAN's coverage of the vote as a mere 154 Republicans voted to sustain George W. Bush' veto of the bill.
The bill they helped defeat would have reauthorized and expanded funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to provide health insurance to as many as 10 million uninsured children.
Supporters of the bill, ranging from a bipartisan majority in Congress, health professional, insurance lobbyists, faith community organizations, the labor movement, progressive activist organizations, and so on, pointed out that, according to a CBS poll conducted just before the veto override vote took place, about 4 in 5 Americans supported the bill.
An NPR/Kaiser/Havard University survey found that most Americans just don't believe Bush's argument that the S-CHIP program is a version of socialized medicine or that it will 'crowd out' children from private insurance rolls.
In fact, according to the survey, half of the people who do believe the Bush administration's claim that is a step toward 'government-run health care' see that as a positive thing.
And 2-in-3 Americans feel the government needs to do more to provide health insurance to children who are not currently covered.
In 2004, George W. Bush agreed with this popular assessment and even promised in his campaign for reelection to expand the S-CHIP rolls to cover uninsured children. So it is ironic and telling that he now used only the fourth veto of his administration to block its expansion.
Democrats and health care advocates are vowing to continue the fight to expand S-CHIP to cover 10 million children.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to return a second S-CHIP bill that covers 10 million children to the president's desk.
According to the New York Times, many moderate Republicans understand they cannot afford politically to block a second bill, and even that President Bush would be forced to sign an S-CHIP bill resembling the one just vetoed.
Virginia Republican Rep. Thomas M. Davis, whose state is now, since the 2006 election of Democratic Sen. Jim Webb and the retirement of Sen. John Warner, seen as a swing state, told the Times that Bush '[is] not going to get his way on this.”
But progressive organizations and the labor movement are vowing to punish those Republicans who refused to vote for children's health care.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney described S-CHIP as the number 1 domestic issue in the 2008 elections. “Those who stood with the president and against our children and grandchildren took an extreme position far outside the mainstream values of both their colleagues in Congress and the people. Working men and women will hold them accountable at the voting booth,” Sweeney was quoted as saying.
Change to Win Executive Director Greg Tarpinian echoed this sentiment. 'Those members of Congress who voted to deny health coverage to poor children will face another override vote next November, except this time working families will have the vote,” vowed Tarpinian.
Kentucky-based bloggers took special aim at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who led a smear campaign against some of the people who spoke up in favor of S-CHIP. One victim of the McConnell smear campaign was 12-year old Graeme Frost, whose family was enrolled on the S-CHIP program after the family incurred tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills as a result of an auto accident that put Graeme in a coma.
McConnell's office released blatantly false information to the press claiming that Frost's family was wealthy and didn't really need S-CHIP after Graeme delivered the Democratic Party's weekly radio address earlier this month.
Roger Hickey of Campaign for America's Future put it bluntly. 'Congressional conservatives and the president are the culprits who have stood in the way of a new progressive direction for our nation. Our children will pay a steep price for their cruel politics,' he said.
National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy linked Republican opposition to children's health care to their unquestioning support for the Iraq war. 'George Bush has no trouble funding a government sponsored, 'socialized' war,' she stated, 'yet bristles at the thought of helping poor children who need health care, branding the expanded SCHIP as a program leading us down the slippery slope to 'socialized' medicine.'
More than anything, the battle to reauthorize S-CHIP shows the popular rejection of ultra-right conservative politics that prioritize markets and private corporate profits over the needs of our children.
It shows a clear distinction between the cynical and cruel politics that would force children to suffer in order to enforce a rigid right-wing ideological program and the vast majority of Americans who want children to have access to medical care.
But understanding this sharp division is not enough. By the time November 2008 rolls around, this popular rejection of Republican ideology and politics will have to be turned into an electoral defeat for that party.
A strong progressive majority in Congress and a Democratic president are the best tools for working families to win better health care for their children.
--Joel Wendland can be reached at
