August 21, 2007

"Rules May Limit Health Program Aiding Children." Yes, that modest headline sits atop today's New York Times, front page, column six, Robert Pear reporting, all hands on deck. The Bush administration is attempting to stop, or limit, the efforts by a number of states to extend SCHIP to children (and, by the way, adults) in families earning more than 250 percent of the federal poverty level, for the obvious reason that such expansions will move millions of kids with private insurance onto the government dole, with all of the privileges and perversities thereto pertaining.

Let us note for the record that the CBO reports that 80 percent of kids in families earning 200-300 percent of the poverty line have private health insurance. For kids in families earning 300-400 percent of the poverty line: 90 percent.

No matter: The compasschion of the annointed knows no bounds. And so some bureaucrat in New Jersey is aghast: "It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children." A California bureaucrat: "[This policy is] much more restrictive than what we want to do." And then there is the fair Rachel Klein of Families USA, with whom I had the pleasure of a recent radio give-and-take on August 13 (see the "Fish In a Barrel" post below), quoted in an AP story Monday: "The effect of this policy is to have more uninsured kids."

Uh, no, my friends. The effect of shifting more people out of private coverage into government insurance, over time, will be increasing price controls, utilization constraints, and all the other perversities so familiar to those condemned to government health insurnace overseas, because government has interest groups rather than patients. Thus will increasing government"coverage" lead inexorably to less actual health care; this is obvious in the state Medicaid programs, which are experiencing ever-greater difficulty finding doctors willing to accept Medicaid patients due to low reimbursement schedules.

And by the way: If the fair Rachel and all the others are so passionate about being compassionate, why don't they advocate state implementation of their own respective versions of SCHIP, with their own eligibility rules and... their own tax dollars. That's right: No federal dollars, no federal rules, and no federal interference with compassion for the kids in the state capitals. Win-win! Well, not so fast. Our own tax dollars? Surely you (well, I) jest! Somehow, I have a vague sense that if the state advocates of government insurance for all kids had to raise the tax dollars locally, the enthusiasm for 300 percent or 400 percent of the federal poverty line would diminish sharply. But that's just me.

Posted by Benjamin Zycher at August 21, 2007 05:59 PM

Comments

Post a comment