Cant Keep Quiet!

When it comes to a choice of providing health care for needy children or protecting the profits of insurance companies, Bush has said that he’ll protect the insurance companies.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program as it stands today will expire on September 30th. Congress and the Senate are currently working to extend the program and provide coverage for even more children. From The Gavel:

A bipartisan coalition of Senate and House leaders today announced a bicameral agreement to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for an additional five years. CHIP provides health coverage to American children whose parents do not qualify for Medicaid, but can’t afford private insurance. The $35 billion agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators will bring health coverage to approximately ten million children in need – preserving coverage for all 6.6 million children currently covered by CHIP, and reaching millions more low-income, uninsured American children in the next five years.

The plan calls for phasing out health care provisions for childless adults and parents so and doing the following:

• Investing $35 Billion in New Funding for CHIP.
• Lowering the rate of uninsured low-income children.
• Improving Access to Benefits for Children (Dental Coverage/Mental Health Parity/EPSDT).
• Prioritizing children’s coverage.
• Providing states with incentives to lower the rate of uninsured low income children.
• Improving Outreach Tools to Simplify and Streamline Enrollment of Eligible Children.
• Improving the Quality of Health Care for Low-Income Children.
• Improving Access to Private Coverage Options.

Last Thursday, Bush tried to make people believe that his reason for vowing to veto the bill is because he is such a good steward of taxpayer money. After all, he’s never put the money has spends hand over fist to support the Iraq occupation into the budget. He just keeps asking for supplemental funding because he’s trying to be a good steward of taxpayer money.

Right.

His real concern is clear in this statement from his Saturday radio address:

Our goal should be to move children who have no health insurance to private coverage — not to move children who already have private health insurance to government coverage. –emphasis mine

Heaven forbid that the private insurance companies should have a little competition from the government. Heaven forbid that those children without health care coverage should be provided health care coverage. It’s much more important to protect private business.

Bush has offered only $5 million additional funding to provide health care coverage to the poor. That will barely cover the cost of children already in the CHIP program. Democrats and Republicans want to expand health care coverage to an additional 4 million children that currently don’t have any coverage.

Please contact your representatives and let them know that supporting children is much more important than supporting insurance companies.