Democrats may never get enough votes to override President Bush’s veto of their bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), but they hope to draw quite a bit of GOP blood in the process.
The Democrats’ congressional campaign chairman, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., has promised that a vote to uphold the president’s veto will be portrayed as a vote “in lockstep with the president and against children’s health.”
If SCHIP’s opponents chose to employ the same sort of language, they could charge Van Hollen and his colleagues of voting “in lockstep with the HMOs.” Indeed, while the Democratic effort to expand SCHIP is spun as being “for the children,” the chief beneficiaries of the bill — and the most prolific lobbyists for it — are private health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and other big businesses that would stand on the receiving end of the broadened pipeline of subsidies if Democrats get their way.
SCHIP is a federal program created by the Republican Congress in 1997 with the aim of guaranteeing health insurance for children of families too rich for Medicaid but possibly too poor to avoid health insurance on the free market.
Under SCHIP, the U.S. Treasury matches a percentage of the money states spend on insuring these low-income youths. Under current law, most states cut off families at 200 percent of the poverty level (although that limit can go as high as 400 percent), and children are cut off at their 19th birthday.
The program would expire this year, but rather than simply renew it — or narrow its focus as the president has requested — the Democratic Congress has passed a bill that would dramatically expand it.
The bill would encourage states to loosen their eligibility standards. “Children” would be redefined to include 21-year-olds, and families of four earning more than $82,000 would still be eligible.
More importantly, the bill would provide states with special bonus payments for recruiting more children into the program — Congress would be bribing states to put more of their citizens on welfare.
Supporters reject the argument that SCHIP is a Trojan horse for socialized medicine, pointing out that the program is usually administered by private insurers. In short, states put “poor” children on private HMOs and let the taxpayers pick up the tab.
For the HMOs, what could be better than a customer who is spending someone else’s money? If Congress spends more money on SCHIP and states are scrambling to enroll more families, then HMOs get even more of these customers.
And so while Democrats are dragging children to the White House for photo ops, as if the children are the primary constituency of this bill, federal lobbying records tell a different tale.
Lobbying records from the first half of 2007 show that the health care industry spent more than $227 million lobbying Washington. Congressional Quarterly Healthbeat News reported last month: “What’s behind health care lobbyists’ spending frenzy? Most signs point to … SCHIP.”
Sure enough, the biggest lobbyists in the industry all support the Democratic bill. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade association for HMOs, supports the bill, as do its biggest members, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association (PhRMA), one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists, is also behind the bill. So is the American Medical Association.
Because the details of any substantial bill or regulation will be complex, the mainstream media will always portray the debate as a battle between the interested parties. In this case, the official storyline is that it’s poor children against a president overly concerned about the boogie man “government-run health care.”
But poor children don’t have clout on Capitol Hill. They’re not the reason this bill got 68 votes in the Senate and 265 votes in the House.
It’s got to be nice to be Van Hollen and the Democrats now. You get to do a favor for the HMOs, and everyone’s convinced it’s “for the children.”
Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney is senior reporter for the Evans & Novak Political Report. He can be reached at [email protected]
