Veto SCHIP

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted 265-159 to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, by $35 billion over five years. Later this week, the Senate is expected to pass the same bill by a large margin. The bill, which the Democrats are pushing, garnered the support of 45 House Republicans and will take some Republicans in the Senate, but it doesn't have the margin to override a promised veto from President Bush. While the president has been reluctant to use his veto pen — he's only used it twice before, on a stem-cell-research bill and a bill that would have put a timetable on our commitment to Iraq — he would be more than justified in striking down this unnecessary expansion of the welfare state. Expanding SCHIP will do little more than push middle-class families into dependence on the federal and state governments, actually encouraging people who have private insurance to give it up and become a burden on taxpayers.

SCHIP is a joint state-federal program that provides health coverage to 6.6 million children from families that live above the poverty line but have difficulty paying for private insurance. Already, the program is generous. A family of four with an income of more than $72,000 (350% of the federal poverty level) is eligible for SCHIP's subsidized insurance. Now, Congress wants to expand coverage even further, to families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level ($82,600 for a family of four). But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 89% of families earning between 300% and 400% of the federal poverty level already have coverage. The CBO estimates that some 2 million kids already covered under private insurance would be switched over to government insurance. The only purpose of all of this seems to be to turn children's health insurance into an outright entitlement — part of the Democrat's broader push to move all of America's health-care industry under government control.

Along with expanding SCHIP coverage to include people higher and higher up in the middle class, the Democrats' bill would also give states incentives to sign up aggressively new "clients," by loosening requirements to join the program and encouraging states to market the program (anyone who rides the New York City subway knows how active the Empire State is already being on this front). How is all of this to be funded? Well, the bill would impose a 61-cent increase in the 39-cent a pack federal cigarette tax, bringing it up to an even dollar. We've written before on how corrupt is the government's interest in the cigarette business. It turns out that the government needs to keep people smoking; the Heritage Foundation estimates the government would need to sign up some 22 million more Americans to take up smoking by 2017 to fund this increase in SCHIP. To add to the irony, most smokers are low-income Americans, meaning that the poor essentially will be funding the health insurance of the middle class. Mr. Bush would be right to veto it while working to increase access to private insurance through tax breaks and deregulation.