[ZASHAGALKA]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/pos...lhOGU3NjNlZDA=
http://www.floppingaces.net/2007/10/...oor-schip-kid/

THIS is the Democrat's posterchild for spending YOUR tax dollars to provide health insurance for the less fortunate:

"The Democrats sign up a sick kid to read their Saturday morning radio address.

Graeme Frost of Baltimore is 12 years old, a seventh-grader at the Park School, and he understands why children need health care and their parents need help paying for it.

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work."

A sad, sad, case, yes?

But, with just a little investigating:

"Mr Frost (father), the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families"

Turns out, the father's employer is too cheap to buy this family's insurance because that employer is the boy's own father, the owner of his business.

Amazing, charity is now defined as helping out people that live in million dollar homes that can readily afford high dollar private tuition, but not health insurance. Well, at least YOU can afford to provide this family with insurance. Thank God for taxpayers like YOU or whatever would this family have done.

Remember THIS is the DEMOCRAT'S posterchild for SCHIP. . .

~faith,
Timothy.

[Spidey's mom]

Interesting story. Thanks.

And glad to see you - sometimes I feel all alone.

I am exhausted so that is probably why I'm in the mood I'm in but I am very tired of being characterized as mean because I'm a conservative.

http://allnurses.com/forums/f112/con...rs-254135.html

"Don't hate me because I'm a CONSERVATIVE".

(stopping the whining now . . . .)


steph

[SmilingBluEyes]

And liberals get tired of hearing that the Right has the corner on "family values" as well. And so on it goes....

[Elvish]

Originally Posted by stevielynn

I am very tired of being characterized as mean because I'm a conservative.

And liberals get tired of hearing that the Right has the corner on "family values" as well.

Both of the above statements explain why I'm registered independent. That, and it depends on which issues you're talking about where my leaning is.

Still, I still would rather give kids health insurance who may not really need it than withhold it from ones who really do just for spite.

Some words from both sides of the aisle:
"Today we learned that the same president who is willing to throw away a half trillion dollars in Iraq is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that amount to bring health care to American children." Edward Kennedy, D-MA

"Unfortunately, I believe that some have given the president bad advice on this matter. Supporting the health care bill is the morally right thing to do." -Orrin Hatch, R-UT
Italics mine, of course.

Source

[ZASHAGALKA]

SCHIP is a REPUBLICAN sponsored piece of legislation that was originally passed by a REPUBLICAN Congress.

Helping out the gap between medicare and middle class was a great idea. It still is.

Using it to fund Graeme Frost's healthcare because his essentially rich parents had better things to do with THEIR money than to provide their children with healthcare coverage, especially when YOU will - that was NEVER the intent of the program.

The expansion of SCHIP currently proposed has nothing to do with helping disadvantaged children. It has to do with expanding gov't care to the point of crowding out alternatives. The gov't's OWN statistics indicate that under the proposed bill, over 1 million children would join SCHIP as a result of LEAVING their current insurance.

Let's be clear here: this expansion was never designed to be 'for the children'. From the start, this current SCHIP bill was a hi-jack of an otherwise good program for ideological purposes. It deserved a VETO

If the Democrats want to continue this great piece of REPUBLICAN lawmaking, then they need to get over their ideology and come back to the table and fund this law at the level of its intent: gap kids between medicare and insurance affordability.

~faith,
Timothy.

[VivaLasViejas]

Originally Posted by stevielynn

Interesting story. Thanks.

And glad to see you - sometimes I feel all alone.

I am exhausted so that is probably why I'm in the mood I'm in but I am very tired of being characterized as mean because I'm a conservative.

http://allnurses.com/forums/f112/con...rs-254135.html

"Don't hate me because I'm a CONSERVATIVE".

(stopping the whining now . . . .)


steph

You're not mean, Steph. Neither is Timothy or any of the other well-spoken and thoughtful members who espouse conservative views here. There is a difference between being "mean" and keeping a sharp eye out for waste and abuse of taxpayer funds!

Don't let 'em get you down..........y'all have as much of a right to express your opinions as anybody else.

[HM2Viking]

I don't particularly find conservatives mean. Misguided in their beliefs on occasion but not usually mean.

That said, the data on "crowd out" shows that it is a minimal phenomenon. See CBPP for extensive articles about this issue. Where President Bush has been (justly) criticized on SCHIP is his proposing net cuts to the funding for SCHIP which would result in a loss of coverage for kids. Under his watch the number of un and underinsured kids and their families have started to rise again:



SCHIP pays for itself in the sense that it is conserving human capital for the future through improving kids health. SCHIP also illustrates why a tax funded single payer system will result in better overall care for all patients at a lower average cost.

[HM2Viking]

See also:

Thus, CBO estimates that 3.2 million of these 3.8 million children — or 84 percent of them — have incomes below states’ current eligibility limits. Only about 600,000 of the children would gain eligibility as some states broadened their SCHIP eligibility criteria.
Further evidence that the bill is focused on those who most need help includes:

• Bigger state incentives to cover poorer children. The bill gives states financial incentives to enroll more of the approximately 6 million uninsured children who are eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP but unenrolled. To encourage states to focus on the lowest-income children, it gives them larger incentives for enrolling the poor and near-poor children who are eligible for Medicaid than the modestly better-off children who are eligible for SCHIP.

• Effective targeting on the uninsured. CBO found that nearly two-thirds of those who would gain coverage under the bill would otherwise be uninsured. That makes the bill considerably more efficient than the Administration’s proposals to provide tax breaks for the purchase of private health insurance in the individual market. Less than one-quarter of the benefits of the tax breaks proposed by the Administration last year would go to people who would otherwise be uninsured, according to an analysis by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

http://www.cbpp.org/policy-points10-5-07.htm

http://www.cbpp.org/policy-points10-5-07.jpg

[HM2Viking]

See:



In comparison, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the bipartisan SCHIP agreement passed yesterday by the House on a 265-159 vote, about one-third — or 2 million — of the 5.8 million children who would gain SCHIP or Medicaid coverage by 2012 under the legislation would have otherwise had private coverage, a percentage less than half the 77 percent for the Administration proposals.[1] The CBO estimates also show that 3.8 million children who otherwise would be uninsured would gain coverage by 2012.
Source: http://www.cbpp.org/9-27-07health.htm accessed today.

The point is that the house bill is more efficient than Administration proposals in delivering help to children. President Bush is out of step with his own party on this issue.

[HM2Viking]

See also:

Analysis by Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T. — a leading health economist who conducted a good part of the work on SCHIP crowd-out on which the CBO analysis rests — found, for example, that the proposals in the Administration’s fiscal year 2007 budget to provide tax deductions and credits for the purchase of insurance in the individual health insurance market would carry large costs but result in no net gain in coverage. Gruber found the proposals’ primary effect would be to lead people who already are insured to switch from one form of coverage to another. He estimated that while the proposals would increase the number of Americans who have coverage through the individual market by 8.3 million people, they would cause employer-based coverage to decline by fully as much as coverage in the individual market would rise. Although the proposals would ultimately cost nearly $12 billion a year, Gruber found, they would produce no reduction in the number of uninsured.[30]
Source: http://www.cbpp.org/6-21-07health.htm accessed today.