So much for helping poor kids. It sounds more like a stealth program to get more middle-class Americans, many of whom hardly qualify as “kids,” on government-run health care. It strikes me as “HillaryCare” on the installment plan -- a step toward the socialized-medicine utopia that the New York senator failed to push through while she was first lady.
If this sounds like a stretch, consider how the House bill would undermine private insurance. “Rather than designing subsidies in an innovative way to encourage private health insurance among families, the bill’s sponsors displace it,” Heritage analysts write. “Recent studies indicate that people with private insurance will likely drop eligible dependents in favor of welfare-style health coverage -- a phenomenon economists refer to as ‘crowd out.’” According to CBO estimates, the House bill would move nearly 2.4 million people off private insurance and onto taxpayer-supported health care.”
Even if this approach was sound -- and it’s not -- the House-passed version of SCHIP reauthorization would be expensive. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would effect a major change in direct government spending of more than $47.4 billion over five years. And -- get this -- the backers of this approach in the Senate plan to get part of that funding by hiking cigarette taxes 61 cents per pack. “The only way the tax would raise the required $35 billion would be to get 22.4 million more folks puffing away over the next decade,” Heritage President Ed Feulner recently wrote. “Encouraging smoking -- now there’s a sure way to improve children’s health.”
Small wonder that President Bush is promising to veto any major expansion of SCHIP.
OK, you may say, the prognosis for the SCHIP legislation is dire. But shouldn’t we do something for the kids that fall through the insurance cracks?
Indeed we should. It just shouldn’t involve the notoriously inefficient arm of government-run health care. There are better ways to get our children covered, many of which are outlined by my colleagues at heritage.org. How about providing a refundable federal health care tax credit or voucher to make it easier for families to get private-sector coverage? Or letting them buy insurance across state lines? Or creating state-based insurance exchange mechanisms that facilitate the purchase of individual, portable coverage?
Simply enlarging SCHIP may sound appealing. But if we want to cover more children -- and their parents -- there’s a much more affordable, efficient way to do it: by establishing a consumer-driven health insurance market that empowers families and individuals -- not federal bureaucrats.