WN: Bush threatens to veto health bill - USA Today

[WorthyNewsBot]

President Bush on Wednesday reiterated his threat to veto Senate legislation that would substantially increase funds for children's health insurance by levying a 61-cent-a-pack increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

http://www.worthynews.com/news/usatoday-co...nsurance_N-htm/

[JustinM]

I'm not a smoker, but a 61 cent tax increase is way too excessive. Maybe we can get a bunch of smokers dressed as democrats to have a boston tobacco party.

[forrestkc]

This is the renewal of the CHIPs program. There are over 9 million uninsured children in America right now. There is a bipartisan bill in the senate that would renew the block grants from CHIPS, and make changes to cover an additional 4 to 5 million uninsured children over the next 3 years.

President Bush essentially wants to completely scrap CHIPS and give tax incentives for purchasing insurance from the private sector instead. Now, while that may help those of us in the upper middle class if we are not covered by a company plan, its not going to do anything for the majority of the children currently covered under state CHIPS programs. Currently about 6.9 million children have health insurance under SCHIP programs. If the Bush Administration gets its way, the majority of them will join the ranks of the uninsured, and the number of uninsured children will jump from 9 million nationwide to 15 million or more.

[JustinM]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=56742

8-12 million is a far cry from 40-50 million uninsured.

[forrestkc]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=56742

8-12 million is a far cry from 40-50 million uninsured.

Ok, this is a right wing propaganda organization that is citing a right wing propaganda organization, that doesn't even claim to have expertise in healthcare. Look at their source: "So says the Business and Media Institute, a Virginia-based division of the Media Research Center."

I think I will take the U.S. Census Bureau over worldnetdaily. There numbers are here: http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p60-231.pdf

If you want reliable information on this issue, PBS has a cite devoted to it here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_covera...alth/uninsured/

45 million uninsured, Nearly one in five Americans under the age of 65 were without health insurance in 2005, a number that has continued to increase in the last decade. The demographics of the nearly 45 million uninsured are a mix of people living below the poverty line, young people and others.

Work status and income

"The uninsured are -- and have been for years and years -- mainly people who make less than 200 percent of the poverty level," said Cathy Hoffman, associate director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. In 2006, that federal poverty level was $20,000 for a family of four.

Poor, however, does not mean unemployed. Nearly 70 percent of the uninsured come from families with at least one full-time worker.

"The uninsured aren't people who are disconnected from employment, but they are disconnected from affordable health insurance -- either because it's not offered by their employer or because the share they're asked to pay is more than they can afford," said Hoffman.

Part-time workers, who are less likely to be offered health insurance, are even more vulnerable. They make up only 19 percent of the population, but 28 percent of the uninsured.

Workers who work for small companies are also more at risk, because those companies are less likely to be able to offer insurance to their employees. Only 52 percent of companies with less than 10 workers offer their employees health insurance, while 99 percent of firms with more than 200 employees do, according to a 2004 Kaiser Foundation study of employer health benefits.

"The profile of the uninsured has not really changed much since we've been studying it," said Paul Fronstin, a senior research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, who's been examining data on the uninsured for more than 15 years. "It's low income workers, it's people in the labor force or associated with someone in the labor force, and it's disproportionately tied to people who work in small businesses."

[JustinM]

Your facts are just as "credible" as mine and I will leave it at that.

We can go tit for tat all day long and you won't sway my informed opinion.

PBS is far from objective and I won't trust anything a government censue bureau produces, since they are the ones that want more of my money.

[forrestkc]

Your facts are just as "credible" as mine and I will leave it at that.

We can go tit for tat all day long and you won't sway my informed opinion.

PBS is far from objective and I won't trust anything a government censue bureau produces, since they are the ones that want more of my money.

Well, I am sorry, but if you want to believe some right wing propaganda rag over the U.S. Census Bureau, then thats your choice, but your not well informed by doing so, and your source is not credible.

[Giaour]

So what if they are uninsured.

I raised my kid without insurance and he is fine.

We still dont have insurance.

The hospitals are very nice and flexable making our payments easy to handle.

There are also PRIVATE charities that help pay for hospital bills for the uninsured.

But but but but it's for the children..

Waaaaaa

Let's put a higher tax on chocolate for the children. We all know that chocolate is bad for you too.

I'm getting pretty sick and tired of being forced (by taxes) to pay for every single thing that is "for the children".

Give me a break already.

[forrestkc]

So what if they are uninsured.

I raised my kid without insurance and he is fine.

We still dont have insurance.

The hospitals are very nice and flexable making our payments easy to handle.

There are also PRIVATE charities that help pay for hospital bills for the uninsured.

But but but but it's for the children..

Waaaaaa

Let's put a higher tax on chocolate for the children. We all know that chocolate is bad for you too.

I'm getting pretty sick and tired of being forced (by taxes) to pay for every single thing that is "for the children".

Give me a break already.

Its a moral issue. In the richest nation in the history of civilization, we ought not have the highest child poverty rate of any industrialized nation, and we ought not have 9 million children without health coverage.

The fact that your kid is fine is evidence that you were lucky enough to have a healthy child. Had your child been uninsured, and had a chronic life threatening illness or injury, things would not have went so rosy. Do you honestly think that "flexible and easy to handle payment arrangements could have been made" for health bills totally hundreds of thousands of dollars for something like cancer treatments? Do you think that your uninsured child would have gotten the same quality of healthcare as an insured child? There is a reason why the single biggest reason for personal bankruptcy filings in America is healthcare debt.

Moreover, private charities do not have the resources to even pay the medical bills for a tiny fraction of the uninsured. If you totaled up every cent given to charity in the last year, even included the 80 to 90% of charitable contributions that go things like arts and university programs, you would less than 5% of the annual costs of healthcare in this country.

[forrestkc]

No, it is not a moral issue Forrest. The government is trying to take money from hard working Americans to give it to someone else. You say that we don't have enough money in private charities to pay for health insurance for all the nation's children, so that somehow justifies taking the money by force? I don't agree. The government needs to keep it's hands out of our pockets, and if liberals want to pay for entitlements for the whole country, they need to start giving more to charity. It is easy to take money from others to give it away, but much harder to give it away voluntarily.

We don't live under a dictatorship. No one is getting their money taken by force. If the majority of the people disagree with SCHIP, then all they have to do is elect representatives that would overturn it. It is as simple as that. As a society, we make moral decisions about what kind of a society we are going to have. The people's elected congress, has put forth a bi-partisan extension of the SCHIPS program because as a society, we consider healthcare coverage for children to be a moral issue.