Ah, week 3 of the Frost family and SCHIP! In case you need a refresher course, see my posts here, here, here, here, and here
No one on the right is picking on the 12 year old. The parents have been raked over the coals for “Daddy Frost, the SUV’s before health insurance/woodworking before full-time job guy”. Here is a family that has means but not motivation to have health insurance. Intelligent people don’t bring four children into this world and not do everything possible to make sure that there is insurance to cover accidents or long term illnessess. That’s insane.
How will SCHIP be funded?
What’s regrettable about the SCHIP debate is not that the Frost family received national attention after seeking it out, but that so many important parts of the debate are being glossed over. Nothing in the Reid-cum-Frost radio presentation, for instance, mentioned that the Reid-Pelosi $35 billion SCHIP expansion plan is underfunded.
The big-spending expansion proponents urge Congress to adopt a 61 cents per pack cigarette tax increase to pay for expansion. But as Michelle C. Bucci and William W. Beach of the Heritage Foundation have pointed out, there aren’t enough smokers to pay the SCHIP expansion tab. Bucci and Beach say new tobacco tax funds may be sufficient for no more than two years’ worth of the expansion, and certainly not much more. What will Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi do then? Start running public service announcements asking people to take up smoking, because the Frost family needs help?
:Another inconvenient truth left out of the Reid-Frost presentation is the bitter little fact that whatever funding a tobacco tax increase provides will be highly regressive ” even as the SCHIP expansion makes that program less regressive. As David Hogberg in his paper “SCHIP Expansion: Socialized Medicine on the Installment Plan” for the National Center for Public Policy Research pointed out, if the expansion plan is adopted, “it is not inconceivable that a parent with one child with an income of $13,690 will be funding benefits for two children in a family of four with an income of $82,600.”
12-year-old Graeme Frost probably doesn’t know the SCHIP expansion he’s fronting for would tax the poor to fund the middle class. What’s Harry Reid’s excuse?
Before the bill was vetoed, it was set up for failure. Smoking is not on the rise. As a smoker,I say great! I wish I was a non-smoker. Even with the increased tax, you still fall millions short of coming close to funding the program.
Why can’t out Congress address this issue intelligently?
Michelle Malkin has tons more
The Democraps plan is all emotion, including taxing the smokers. 08, time to clean out the House and Senate of the lying Democraps.
If the GOP were smart, they’d come up with a counter plan that is funded and targets the proper people.
Oh, and Rush said the Democrats have conceded that they do not have the votes in the House to override the veto of SCHIP.
But of course Democrites and useful idiots will take up the hue and cry: “Bush wants to hurt poor kids” and “Republicans don’t care about the poor” echoed by the MSM and dopes everywhere will be captivated by the sound-byte simplicity.