Tyler Morning Telegraph - There's A Story Behind President's SCHIP Veto

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Rep. Louie Gohmert last week added some much-needed perspective on the contentious debate on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill veto by President George Bush.

"It is easy for someone to make a legislator look good or bad over a vote on any legislation depending upon which facts the writer chooses to include and chooses to omit," the Tyler Republican notes. "This is especially true with the SCHIP bill which passed out of the U.S. House last week. I support the SCHIP program, and even President Bush supports expanding it by $5 billion. My opposition is not against the program but rather the poorly crafted legislation that was passed through Congress. There are some facts you should know about the bill I voted against."

For example, flaws in the bill would have allowed illegal immigrants to enroll.

"The legislation included a line that said illegal aliens will not be allowed to enroll, but would only require that a name and Social Security number be provided as documentation of legal status to acquire coverage," Gohmert says. "The Social Security Administration has confirmed that the provision in the bill will not prevent illegal aliens and legal aliens who are not naturalized citizens who use fraudulent, matching names and Social Security numbers from accessing health care benefits. This is yet another substantial expansion of taxpayers paying for non-taxpayers. "

And the bill would have allowed some states to provide coverage to children who are by no definition "poor" - from families earning three and even four times the poverty level. Many of these children already have private health coverage.

"According to a Congressional Budget Office study, this will shift 2 million children from receiving private health insurance to government health insurance," Gohmert says. "Since the SCHIP program is for children in poverty whose parents may not qualify for Medicaid, there were many of us who believed that states should not be able to use the federal tax dollars to pay for insurance for children in wealthier families until such state had covered 90 percent of eligible children in families bringing in less than twice the poverty level."

And politics played a part in the crafting of the bill.

"In normal order, the House and the Senate would have convened a conference to discuss the legislation and come to an agreement on the final text which is to be voted on," Gohmert explains. "However, the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate refused to convene a conference and blocked any Republican in the House from participating in the SCHIP negotiations."

Abuses in the legislative process get little ink, Gohmert says.

"But those abuses do explain why some of the laws being passed by the majority are not any better than they are," he says. "Open and honest debate is what America was promised in the last elections. What we have gotten is at the other extreme. The SCHIP bill now vetoed is a massive expansion of government run health care."

A bad bill came to a bad end.

"The president has vetoed the bill, and when Congress is unable to override that veto, then we will get to reauthorize SCHIP so that it serves more of its intended purpose as it did when created in 1997," Gohmert says.

A viable re-authorization bill - with a more responsible expansion of the program - has already been authored. Co-sponsor Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, says the Kids First bill provides for a $10 billion expansion that would cover an additional 200,000 Texas children.

"Our focus must be on covering low-income children first - the original intent of the program," Cornyn says.

Both Gohmert and Cornyn deserve our appreciation for standing firm on the issue - knowing how easy it is for their opponents to paint them as heartless.

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