Sacrificing the health of kids to make a point? Shame on you...

My wife and I find ourselves at times mimicking couples like James Carville and Mary Matalin--happily married, but at polar opposites when it comes to political issues. But on issues such as the ongoing debate about funding for State Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP), I'm finding myself continuing to slide closer to her on the left.

CHIP is a government-sponsored plan which provides basic medical coverage and presciption drugs to children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford private health insurance. The program has been relatively successful in the ten years it has been implemented, but more funding is needed to ensure all kids in this group are covered. As the plan is set to expire in two months, Democrats and a few Republicans from across the aisle have been scrambling to put together a bill that increases federal funding of the program. The House, in fact, just approved their version of the bill today by a narrow margin of 225-204. Republicans, however, see this as a sneaky way of introducing socialized, government-run health care into the system, and want the program halted. In fact, President Bush has already stated he would veto any such bill that comes to his desk.

As much as I tend to fear what a catastrophe government-run medical care would be like in the United States, I can't agree with this ideological stand the Republican Party is taking. Florida Senator Mel Martinez probably sums up the skewed conservative logic on this issue:

“A number of us on the Republican side really do believe that we need to insure every American, and the way to do that is to provide the tax credits necessary to allow people to obtain individual private health insurance policies.”

Well, that's all fine and good if you could guarantee those people would actually buy insurance for their kids, a legal mandate that pretty much every Republican opposses. So instead, we'll be left with this growing population of uninsured children. Hospitals tend to eat up the costs of the uninsured, which is why many of America's top children's hospital budgets seem to run in the red each year. As a result, I fear we'll all be feeling the hurt in the form of increased medical fees and health insurance premiums. Heck, someone's has to pay for all this. It's strange that we can all agree that children are entitled to a free education up to the age until they reach adulthood, but we can't all agree that their health needs should be covered, too. It's one thing to give adults the right to choose whether they should spend their money on health insurance or not, but it's ridiculous that conservatives are taking a stand on the issue of socialized medicine using a pediatric population that needs to be protected.

Perhaps I don't know enough about the details of this plan, but certainly the Republicans aren't making much of a case for themselves if there is something I've missed in this whole debate. I have a feeling this is really going to bite them back in the end. Interestingly, I don't even think Democrats are pushing for actual "socialized" health care, just "universal" health care. Even looking back at Hillary Clinton's debacle to introduce radical health care reform back in the early 90's, what was summed up as a left-wing plot to socialize medicine in the U.S. actually was based on a foundation of private HMO's and insurance companies providing the actual medical care. The two words aren't synonymous, but conservatives seem to be trying their best to make them so.