The Washington Post yesterday let us know about how Bush really feels about the poor, poor children in particular: screw ’em and let ’em die.
Quoting “philosophical reasons”, W voiced his opposition to the legislation which would have renewed and expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, put forth by Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program currently costs the federal government $5 billion a year (a far cry from the near-half-trillion we’ve spent on the Iraq War, or the $1-2 trillion we will have spent by 2016) and “helps provide health coverage to 6.6 million low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance on their own.”
An additional 3.3 million children would have been covered by the Baucus legislation, and the money would have not come from taxpayers en masse but rather from raising the excise tax on cigarettes to $1 per pack.

“I support the initial intent of the program,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post after a factory tour and a discussion on health care with small-business owners in Landover. “My concern is that when you expand eligibility . . . you’re really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government.”…
About 3.3 million additional children would be covered under the proposal developed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), among others. It would provide the program $60 billion over five years, compared with $30 billion under Bush’s proposal. And it would rely on a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, to $1 a pack, which Bush opposes.

Republicans warned that if the president were to veto this legislation, that the Democrats would make another, more expensive proposal that could affect more taxpayers.
And like blogger Ari Berman writes for The Nation, this is not the only “successful government program” benefiting the poor that Bush opposes: “I believe government cannot provide affordable health care,” Bush said at a recent healthcare roundtable. (Bush also opposed the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, even “trimming” the programs until 2011, in legislation bundled with an $11.9 billion cut to student loan subsidies.)
Baruch Hashem that the Senate Finance Committee voted 17-4 in favor of reauthorizing and expanding S-CHIP, “in defiance of” W.
What Bush is failing to realize is that someone can not simply walk up with their W-2s and buy medications or health treatments with their “$7,500 deductible.” Rite Aid and CVS don’t readily accept “tax credits” as payment. And the refund checks are slow in coming, unlike medical complications.
Bush says he supports “common sense” health care, health care that puts “individuals…in charge” of their own medical coverage. In other words, you pay for it.
And if you can’t afford it, then, like Ari Berman said in The Nation, just “drop dead”.