| And the New York Times:
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush's weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats' plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family's income and assets - even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite - and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
To be fair to conservative opponents to CHIP, both papers engage in nutpicking. And the New York Times does a decent job of sifting through the rhetorical garbage on the right to come up with the essence of the argument:
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor - Medicaid already helps the impoverished - but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
Perhaps the conservatives' views are best expressed on the Riehl World View:
Without knowing why two college-educated adults who grew up in middle, and or or upper middle class families, allowed themselves to get into a position where they had four kids and no health care, it's impossible to know why they now need government support. If they brought those circumstances on themselves, no reasonable person is suggesting their children shouldn't continue to be covered given what they now face. But some of us would like to know if another government entitlement simply ended up enabling irresponsible behavior and dumb choices by two parents who weren't providing for their children's health care before this all started.
It's not the same hate-filled tone of the nutpicked comments, but it's loathsome in its own way, isn't it? All of the Frost's problems are their own, apparently. They had the means to get good-paying corporate jobs (like post's author, apparently), and they didn't. End of story. The idea that CHIP "enables irresponsible behavior" - especially in this case - is ludicrous. The guy has his own business, they're landlords, his kids are in private schools on scholarship, they earn $40K a year. By every standard I can conceive of, they're responsible parents.
The thing is, not everybody can get a job with benefits. And not everybody wants the kind of job that provides benefits. Frost père has a carpentry business - what's wrong with that? Are conservatives saying folks shouldn't be carpenters?
Not long ago, I wrote up a post about a woman who quit her teaching job to join the military - ostensibly because of insurance benefits. And that's the point: insurance costs have climbed so high for families today, that it forces folks to abandon otherwise decent-paying jobs they're interested in to pay for the health of their families. Health care is a problem for not just the "working poor," but increasingly for middle class and professional families, too.
Conservatives who complain about folks using CHIP who have the means are missing the point. Insurance is too expensive for a lot of folks, largely because of the industry's slavish devotion to profits at the expense of consumers. They prefer to cover only the healthy. They put insane deductibles into the policies to discourage policy-holders from seeking medical care. They built inefficiencies into the system to discourage claims. And even if you do, they'll screw you from here to Siam to get out of reimbursing you what's rightly yours. It's a system rigged against consumers. That is, you and me. And our very lives are at stake over it.
Here's what I wrote then:
Look, I don't think there's a conspiracy between the government and insurance companies to raise health care costs so high to ensure that US citizens can't take risks in their professional lives (like, say, working on art instead of computer software?or becoming professional revolutionaries, maybe), or to ensure that the ranks of its armies remain well-stocked, but I do think that's the effect of diminishing value of paychecks and high health care costs.
People don't necessarily want a steady corporate desk job and the money that comes along with it. People don't necessarily want to join the Army. Some people want to write or teach or farm or stay at home raising their kids.
And that's what this battle is about, IMHO. It's about whether this country will continue to have a middle class or not. |
