Hooray! We've reached another milestone in the annals of Compassionate Conservatism. According to the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute almost 2,000 children become uninsured every day in this country. This number includes all children that are eligible for Medicaid, SCHIP and those dropped from private insurance. Those numbers are reflected in the counter at the top of this post and in the sidebar and show that while President Bush continues to change his reasons for refusing to help ten million children have access to health care, there are more and more children and families out there suffering the anxiety and lack of care that comes from being uninsured.
But let's not heap all our scorn on the heads of the cruel President and his minions in Congress. We can save some for the Democrats who can't keep their caucus together long enough to pass a bill that expands an overwhelminly popular program that lets sick kids see a doctor and their parents sleep a little bit easier at night. Compassionate Conservatism is a bi-partisan racket.
Stories like this don't make me hopeful for the coming health care reform war.
I believe that the strengths of our energies and of our sympathies have been stolen.
President Bush's vetos may have been the correct thing to do. Do not forget that he supported the extension of the program, but not its expansion until its present abuses and problems could be addressed.
Today's expansion is not a victory for children, but a victory for those Congressional thieves and murderers who do not want to expand coverage for children but want to further throw more money (that we don't have) away to (1) illegal immigrants, (2) healthcare to adults where SCHIP is abused massively in places like AZ and MN and (3) bailing out unethical entities like Planned Parenthood with more tax dollars.
We must not censor the critics of popular efforts, but to listen to them carefully, otherwise, we may be drinking nothing but purple punch and celebrating because of it.
A note on (3): Nancy Pelosi argued yesterday that this expansion is only X number of days of funding for the Iraq War, somehow justifying a small amount of $. Remember that the present Iraq War that we fret upon began in 2003. It's barely six years old. Yet, we have just seen Pelosi and her allies push through bailout funds for a miserable financial industry—a bailout worth not X number of days of funding for the Iraq War, but closer to 15 YEARS of funding for the Iraq War. Pelosi does not shy away from spending money, that the nation doesn't have to save her own half million dollars of investments. Neither do her allies. Much less will they care to spend more such money to help out their supporters.
What's the connection to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers? These are some of Pelosi's biggest supporters. With problems with one of their biggest supporters—Madoff, the strawman is becoming evident. SCHIP expansion involves money to channel tax dollars to K-12 so-called health education. Or course it is very specifically for reproductive health education, in other words, abortion clinics like Planned Parenthood to further solicit their ideas within the public education system.
Remember in that in our current economic climate, spending this many hundreds of billions of dollars in debt means unheard of inflations will occur around the corner. We don't honestly believe that somehow we will be benefactors of so many more millions of dollars of healthcare do we? The value of our healthcare will remain the same or diminish. The value of the dollar will have shrunk because nobody in their right minds will recognize value in anything that has a zero credit rating.
The latest Congress has shown itself to be the spineless bunch that we always knew it to be. And the newest Congress to be sworn in next week will be even worse. Remarkably, the nation's fiscal policies were so much better from 1995 through 2007 with its GOP control.
We've now drank the purple punch and we now celebrate our doom.
Posted by: Susan B Anthony | January 15, 2009 at 05:19 AM