Spring Training For Universal Health Care

Congress will spend much of this month debate a reauthorization and expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Over at The Prospect, I have a column explaining the subtext of that debate, and how the Bush administration has unwittingly made it a testing ground for universal health care:

it is rather hard to oppose fully funding the program that covers uninsured children. So the White House has decided to make this a referendum on government-provided health care instead. This decision is a godsend to Democrats, who should contentedly accept Bush's willingness to equate health care for children with public health care, and allow this to become exactly as grand a battle as Bush appears willing to make it.

Bush, after all, is not a man unacquainted with the wonders of government care. As the San Francisco Chronicle's David Lazarus has noted, this steadfast opposition to public care is "coming from a man who just underwent a colonoscopy performed at the taxpayer-funded, state-of-the-art medical facility at Camp David by an elite team of doctors from the taxpayer-funded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md." It might be worth it for the Democrats to ask why he should receive such gold-plated care from the government, but the nation's uninsured children should be barred from public coverage.

It might also behoove them to ask why the GOP appears so afraid of public competition. S-CHIP, after all, is not a compulsory program. It is open to those who qualify, but only extended to those who sign up. Any family who believes that private insurance would do better by lil' Johnny can send away for Aetna with nary a word from a bureaucrat. What scares Bush and his financial backers is that they won't.

Read the rest.