Like many a good research-monkey in Washington last week, I found myself combing through the fine points of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program bill. Reading the proposed law online, I learned it would not only extend insurance coverage to families making 300 percent of the poverty level, it would also define a “child” as anyone 25 years of age or younger. I did a little math in my head and–cha-ching!–realized I too could qualify for insurance under S-chip, as a single 22-year-old man (oops, I mean child) making less than $30,630, which is three times the poverty level for an individual.
For a fleeting moment, I was worried. Getting in line for the government dole might make me a conservative hypocrite, complicit in nationalizing health care and raising taxes on smokers, who will pay for S-chip’s expansion through a new 61 cent tax on every pack of cigarettes. But I felt justified when I remembered that, as a year-long Collegiate Network “fellow” at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, rather than a normal, if lowly, staff member, I’m stuck shelling out $45 a month for catastrophic health insurance, while all my colleagues suckle at the teat of News Corp.’s health care plan–a plan that, unlike the insurance I conservatively choose to buy, is effectively subsidized with a federal tax break.
Alas, my dream of becoming a welfare-king was short-lived. As I returned to pointing and clicking my way through the S-chip bill, I realized I had been reading the original S-chip bill sponsored by Representative John Dingell. That bill had died in the House. The bill that Congress actually passed and President Bush vetoed defines a “child” as a person who does not “exceed 21 years of age.” Having exceeded 21 back in January, I’d missed the cut after all. Ticked off, I couldn’t understand why elite congressmen had callously abandoned millions of middle-class twenty-somethings like me–hardworking Americans who know what it feels like to go to bed sober many nights.
So, I set out to discover who on Capitol Hill had robbed me of three years of congressionally mandated childhood. This proved a bewildering quest.
Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, didn’t give me any names, and he even insisted the age cap was 18 and always had been. He wrote in an email that the bill’s language defining a child as someone younger than 22 “deals with Medicaid, not S-CHIP.” I replied that the relevant section of the bill repeatedly refers to Medicaid and S-chip. Later, off the record, a Democratic Senate staffer gave me a plausible explanation for how the language, despite its apparent meaning, could actually leave the age cap at 18. So I pressed Pelosi’s spokesman for an explanation on the record. He didn’t reply.
I called Democratic congressman Charlie Rangel, the sponsor of the S-chip bill Bush vetoed. When he got back to me, I asked him whether he knew what the age cap was. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I would expect that it’s an age commonly referred to as a child.” I asked if he would object to setting the age cap at 25, and Rangel told me: “It doesn’t sound like a children’s bill at 25.” He hardly seemed an advocate for big kids like me.
Republicans were just as hazy about the age cap. The White House press office didn’t know. Congressman Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia who supports the bill, said in a phone interview: “I can’t tell you exactly, but I think it’s under 18.”
But what if it’s not, and the bill covers 21-year-olds, I asked? Davis conceded, “That’s not unreasonable.” So would raising the cap to 25 be a deal-breaker for him? “Twenty-five would not make or break it for me,” he said, “but if you went any higher I think it would.”
With Rangel unsupportive and Davis tepid at best about insuring man-children, I decided I would have to resign myself to the status quo: scrimping to buy my own insurance and budgeting for the possibility of unexpected medical costs. Granted, my annual out-of-pocket health care expenditures usually equal the price of a big bottle of NyQuil plus a pack of bendy straws. But that’s no guarantee.
Then again, I don’t really know what I’d do with the money I’d save if the government gave me health insurance. I guess I could take up smoking. Somebody’s taxes have to pay for S-chip.
JOHN MCCORMACK
