GOP contenders back Bush on veto

By RUTH MARCUS

WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — You might have thought, given the popularity of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the unpopularity of President Bush, that the Republican presidential candidates wouldn’t be racing to support the president’s veto.

You might have thought, given that 18 Republican senators voted to support the expansion, that the candidates might at least refrain from tossing around epithets such as “socialized medicine” (former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani) and “phony smoke-and-mirrors” (Arizona Sen. John McCain, on the financing).

You might have thought that presidential contenders would shy away from alienating one of the measure’s leading champions, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-First Caucus State.

You’d be wrong.

Instead, the leading Republican candidates have embraced the veto, demonstrating in varying degrees a combination of technical ignorance, ideological bluster and — though this is less certain — political miscalculation.

“Half to two-thirds of the children that they’re going to take care of already have private insurance,” Giuliani said. Actually, of the 5.8 million children who would gain health coverage, fewer than 2 million — 1 in 3 — would be those who have or would eventually obtain private coverage.

Giuliani derided the proposal as a “typical Democratic, Clinton kind of thing” and “a big step in the direction of government-controlled medicine.” No matter that most SCHIP beneficiaries are enrolled in private health plans. No matter that Medicare, by Giuliani’s definition, is “government-controlled medicine.”

Saving kids

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney argues that we need to deprive children of coverage in order to save them. “I’d veto it out of my belief that we should have every citizen insured,” he told the Kansas City Star. “I put forward a plan in my state that gets every citizen insured.” Perhaps Romney has forgotten: His plan included SCHIP eligibility for families earning three times the poverty level — the very amount in the current measure.

McCain cast his veto support in terms of fiscal discipline. “We’ve laid a debt on these same children that ... we’re saying we’re going to give health insurance to,” he told CNN. “If they can find a legitimate way to pay for it, I would consider it, but (what) was supposed to be for low-income Americans is now up to 400 percent of the poverty level, just like the Medicare prescription drug program, an unfunded liability.”

But the children’s health funding is neither unfunded (an increase in the tobacco tax would cover the cost of the five-year extension) nor an unlimited entitlement, continued automatically no matter what the price. It’s important to worry about piling debt on future generations; I worry more about leaving the current generation of children without health coverage.

McCain is also wrong in claiming the eligibility level “is now up to 400 percent” of poverty; in fact, the limit would be 300 percent. The sole exception would be New York — and only with administration approval.

In supporting the veto — the bill was “an attempt at ‘Hillary-care’ by another name” — Fred Thompson has the benefit of consistency, sort of. As a Tennessee senator Thompson voted against SCHIP a decade ago, though he now calls it “a good idea and a good program that’s working.”

The most interesting move on SCHIP came from former Arkansas Gov.Mike Huckabee at Tuesday’s debate. Huckabee had previously sounded supportive of Bush. Pressed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews about whether he would have vetoed the measure, however, Huckabee equivocated: “I’m not absolutely certain that that’s going to be the right way because there are going to be so many issues we’ve got to fight. And the political loss of that is going to be enormous.”

Voters’ anger

That his fellow contenders have made the opposite political calculation can be explained by GOP voters’ anger at what they see as out-of-control government spending. Especially from the viewpoint of those working to convince the base of their conservative bona fides, breaking with Bush on SCHIP could be risky.

But that has to be balanced against the broad support for SCHIP expansion even among Republican voters, about 60 percent in the latest Post poll.

X Marcus is a member of The Washington Post’s editorial page staff.