Can't We Cover the Kids?

In the interests of helping people find information on health care, I want to start by linking to a series of articles and editorials from this summer regarding the battle over S-CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program.

After all, it seems to me that the concept of ensuring healthy children is an issue where compassion easily ought to trump dollars. Nelson Mandela once said that the keenest measure of a society's soul is how it treats its' children. In America, 9 million children go without health insurance, and millions more manage to fall through the cracks.

Here's a Washington Post article regarding Bush's principled promise to veto expanding the S-CHIP program, either to add more funding to cover rising health care costs, or to cover additional children: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/18/AR2007071801434.html?referrer=email

The problem is real, for all the talk of 'free'health care in emergency rooms. Here's a profile of a 12-year-old who died, literally, of a toothache; as Herbert asks, "What’s the sense of being the richest nation on the planet if you can’t even afford to keep your children healthy and alive?" http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp America's better than that, and we can do far better.

Here's an excellent editorial by Princeton professor Paul Krugman on the matter, pointing out that the argument against expanding S-CHIP relies on casting it as one step down that supposedly terrible road towards universal health care completely misses the substance of the Senate Finance Committee's bipartisan bill. Krugman points out that denying innocent children health insurance is flatly immoral--but there is hope. A Georgetown University poll found that 9 in 10 people, including 83% of self-identified Republicans, support expanding S-CHIP.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30krugman.html?th&emc=th

That poll is just one example of why there is hope in this fight: we are decent, moral, conscientous people. We care for one another; all it takes is education to know that not only is health care possible, but we must only make our political will felt to make universal health care a reality.

(I'll post more on S-CHIP's more recent developments later, but I wanted to start by giving you some background.)

--Jordan Bubin '09