Beat the Drum Slowly

True to his promise, President Bush vetoed the bipartisan State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation sent to his desk last week, and even though I guess I expected it, I was still shocked, SHOCKED that it had come to this. And furious, too, because I just didn’t understand how the cadre of Republicans who voted against extending the program could do that, if it was true, as widely reported, that over 70% of the American people supported the bill.

Locally speaking, I’ve had a hard time squaring Congressman Joe Barton’s opposition to expanding the program since, according to an April report in the Houston Chronicle, “Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation."

It seemed to me that, if so many citizens wanted SCHIP expanded, then the offices of the 6th Congressional District, which includes Ellis County, should have been flooded with calls and emails and faxes and regular old letters; and you’d think that knowing that his constituents cared about the issue would have persuaded the congressman to respond to the people’s wishes.

Of course, it’s possible that most folks in the 6th District did NOT want the program expanded, in which case Joe did the right thing. That must be the case, because I just can’t believe his loyalty would be to President Bush rather than to his constituents!

Then another possibility occurred to me: Could it be that the public didn’t know the facts?

Look, I admit to being a news junkie, one of those people who live and breathe current events, and I’m lucky that my work from home makes it easy for me to keep informed. So let me pass on just a few items that you may not know:

Item: Our own Joe Barton was the Republican Floor Leader for the opposition to the SCHIP bill; it was his job to lead the fight against the bill, to keep fellow congressmen from defecting to the support side, and presumably to make life difficult for those who chose to support it.

Item: The President vetoed the bill, claiming, among other things, that expanding the Bill to bring the number of children covered to 10 million from the present 6 million, would (a) cost too much, (b) lead inevitably to “socialized medicine,” and (c) make it possible for “adults making $83,000 a year” to be covered. Item (a) is a judgment call (think Iraq); (b) and (c) are simply not true, and I challenge any reader to offer irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

The funding the President said he would agree to not only did not provide for expansion but would actually cause children to be dropped off the program. Again, I’m not going to bother you with details here, as I have written about them before, but I challenge any reader to prove me wrong.

Item: The legislation expanding SCHIP passed the Senate by more than enough votes to override the presidential veto; the House vote, 273 to 156, was just 13 votes shy of where it needed to be. Thanks, Joe.

Item: The supporters of the legislation were aided by a family whose 12-year-old son was a beneficiary of SCHIP. Standing before the microphones, the child spoke in public to urge Congress to expand the program so that other children would benefit as he had.

Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old, had been critically injured, as was his younger sister, in an automobile accident, and SCHIP stepped in when the family resources ran out. He was in intensive care, in a coma, and in rehab for months. He still has partial paralysis.

The attacks began almost immediately, and thanks to emails from the office of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader, news outlets were contacted and told that the Frosts were very wealthy, that their home was in a neighborhood of half-million-dollar homes, that the two children were in an expensive private school, that they were well able to buy their own insurance, and so on and on. One blogger went so far as to publish the Frosts’ home address.

The truth is that the Frosts’ combined income was less than $45,000 a year; they had paid $55,000 for their home back when the neighborhood was run down; the only insurance available to them before the accident was $1200 a month, not an amount a family with four children could have paid, and none was available after; the children were in private school on scholarships. After the facts came out, Sen. McConnell confirmed their truth, but the damage was done.

Item: After the Frost incident, one of Joe Barton’s websites published a page using The Simpsons characters for graphic effect, entitled “Children’s Health Fact of the Day.” The page, officially a Press Release for the “House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans, Joe Barton, Ranking Member,” ridicules the idea of a child speaking out for SCHIP.

“Quimby here says he knows a bunch of low-income nobodies who are ripe for the picking.” After which “a restive crowd of backdrop-toddlers who’d been rented by MoveOn for the photo-op” were run out of town by hounds: “The 37 rental children fled and were not seen again, but the arf-arf-arfing of their pursuers could be heard well past sunset.”

Thanks, Joe.

Well, I’m sorry to keep on beating this drum, but I just wanted to make sure that people who might not have the time or opportunity to be news junkies got the whole, sordid story.

The good news is, the program has been extended until mid-November so there is time to make this right. Joe Barton’s number in Washington is 202-225-2002.