How about that!

Micheal Gerson, President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter for five years, writes about health care for children in the following in the Washington Post, with a focus on SCHIP: (emp add)

... consider the situation of a self-employed single mother in New York who is forced to self-insure. The average policy costs about $13,000 a year. So even if she makes $60,000, she will pay more than 20 percent of her pretax income just on health insurance. Giving her some help is not unreasonable.

President Bush, yesterday in a speech in Cleveland: (emp add)

... there's a debate in Washington, D.C. over this. It's going to be manifested here shortly by whether or not we ought to expand what's called S-CHIP. S-CHIP is a program designed to help poor children get insurance. I'm for it. It came in when I was the governor of Texas; I supported that. But now there are plans to expand S-CHIP to include families -- some proposals are families making up to $80,000 a year. In other words, the program is going beyond the initial intent of helping poor children. It's now aiming at encouraging more people to get on government health care.

... I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt -- (applause) -- I'll resist Congress's attempt to federalize medicine.

Ignore Bush's wording that a program designed to assist somebody who can't afford health care for their children is an incentive to leave private care. It presumes private care is the Summum Bonum, not to be interfered with in any way. The point is that Bush is not interested in providing support for families that, as Bush's former speechwriter points out, would be unable to afford health care for their children.


posted by Quiddity at 7/11/2007 02:23:00 AM