| Description | Posted October 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Following up on an earlier item, the president’s decision to veto a bipartisan bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is scandalous, but it’s not without a foundation. Bush didn’t just reject the expansion out of some kind of craven disgust for children’s health; he’s offered specific policy rationales for rejecting the legislation.
The problem, of course, is that these rationales happen to be spectacularly wrong.
McClatchy, arguably the best source for fact-checking in the mainstream media, takes note of some of the other bogus claims opponents of the bill are making. For example, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has repeatedly argued that the proposal was put together without input from Republicans. McClatchy’s Steven Thomma and Tony Pugh explained, “That isn’t true. Senior Republicans such as Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a fiscal conservative, and Orrin Hatch of Utah helped draft the bill.”
One of the White House’s favorite talking points, meanwhile, is that the S-CHIP expansion is so overly generous, it will cover children in households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year. That’s wrong, too.
The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state’s Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.
States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush’s Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using. |
