September 30 - October 6, 2007 Issue |
Posted 9/25/07 at 11:02 AM
When a Republican president vetoes a children’s health-care
program, the story that plays out in many people’s minds seems straightforward
and obvious. It’s a terrible shame. Such a veto is a sign that priorities are
askew in Washington.
But in the case of the president’s planned veto of the
S-CHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) the “obvious” storyline
is 100% wrong. In fact, this is one of those strange cases where folks at the
U.S. Bishops’ Conference might actually applaud a president’s veto of a
children’s health-insurance bill.
Both the U.S. bishops and President Bush once
supported the S-CHIP — but now have raised significant
questions about it. That’s because a new Congress has transformed this welfare
reform into a Trojan horse.
The S-CHIP provides needed health care to many children —
that’s why it is such a grave scandal that congressional leaders have tried to
redirect it. They decided a children’s health bill would be the best place to
set a dangerous precedent by taking dollars from U.S. taxpayers’ paychecks and
using them to pay for abortions.
The S-CHIP debate is filled with paradoxes, but it isn’t so
mysterious after all.
The program was created in 1997, when welfare reform was all
the rage. It was only a few years earlier that President Clinton vowed to “end
welfare as we know it,” and the Republican Congress gave him a way to do so —
preserving the benefits of welfare while slicing off some of the waste.
The concept was simple and significant, both at once.
Instead of spending federal money on the poor from
Washington, D.C., where the agencies distributing the money are far away from
those who need it, money would be sent in block grants to the states. Not only
would this approach be more efficient, it would guarantee that more of the
money we contribute in taxes would actually reach needy people. Less would be
spent on middlemen and red tape.
When the chairman of the U.S. House Ways & Means
Committee, Bill Archer, went into welfare-reform hearings in 1994, he was armed
with papal documents citing the principle of subsidiarity. Yes, federal money
should be spent on the poor, he said, but it should be paid out at the state
level, because those closest to a situation are the best equipped to address
it.
Both parties united to pass the legislation, and Clinton
signed it.
This was in the days before the phrase “compassionate
conservatism” became a campaign slogan for George Bush. Christian professor and
publisher Marvin Olasky coined the term to describe just this kind of policy:
one that paired our desire for charity with our need for pragmatism regarding
our money.
The S-CHIP came from a later Congress, after the first wave
of welfare reform, but it shared that principle: Federal money would be
distributed by the states. S-CHIP money was to be spent providing health care
to children whose parents were above the poverty line and didn’t qualify for
Medicaid, yet couldn’t afford health care.
So why is it being vetoed now? Because when the Congress
changed hands in 2005, new legislators were put in charge, and they decided to
make two significant changes in the S-CHIP program.
First, lawmakers changed the definition of “children.”
Republicans had made sure the previous S-CHIP program defined children as
anyone “from conception to age 19.” That meant that pre-natal care was
available to pregnant woman — for the sake of the children. The new Congress
removed that definition.
Second, lawmakers added “pregnancy services” to the bill.
Through this program, money withheld from your paycheck for taxes could now end
up in the paycheck of an abortionist living in one of 17 states.
The old version of the S-CHIP used language that appeared in
the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and the Fetal Pain Act. Together, these
pieces of legislation made a compelling case, in federal law, that unborn
children had rights, too. The new version of the S-CHIP reverses that gain.
The old version of the S-CHIP honored our nation’s
longstanding federal policies against taxpayer-funded abortions. The new
version of the S-CHIP makes an end-run around those policies.
The old version of the S-CHIP ensured that as much of our
welfare expenditures as possible actually helped serve poor children. The new
version ensures that as much of our taxpayer money as currently possible goes
to fund abortions.
The old version of the S-CHIP had broad-based bipartisan
support and the support of the U.S. bishops. The new version has the support of
Planned Parenthood — and raised the ire of the bishops’ pro-life expert,
Richard Doerflinger.
The old version of the S-CHIP was a very good thing. The
veto of the new version of the S-CHIP is a very good thing — and it shows how
crucially important it is that we have a pro-life president.
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