BuckeyeBlog

With President Bush’s veto of the SCHIP bill, liberals across Ohio are trying to score some political points. House Minority Leader Joyce Beatty said the following:

President Bush is playing politics with the health of our youth. Ohio passed a near-unanimous budget with this brand of health care expansion for our own children intact. And yet, President Bush calls this proposal to cover millions of our kids ‘irresponsible.’ What’s irresponsible is his veto of this critical funding that gets to the heart of one of our biggest issues: protecting our children.

Actually, it’s Ohio politicians who are the irresponsible ones. As Rep. Beatty noted, earlier this year the General Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation pushed by Governor Strickland that expanded Ohio’s children’s insurance program. It wasn’t really needed, as I’ve discussed here before, since at least 80% of the kids in the new income range have private insurance. But even more significantly, these policymakers were counting on an increase in federal spending to fund this program. As is being made clear now, this increased federal funding is far from certain.

Why didn’t these legislators wait until Congress had reauthorized SCHIP before deciding to expand Ohio’s program? That certainly makes more sense than expanding a program and hoping the federal government will pay for the expansion. I guess it’s easier to score some cheap political points by “helping the kids” than by making sure you’ve secured a source of funding for these new services.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.