How S-CHIP Failed
HEADING RIGHT BLOG
The New York Times runs a post-mortem on the S-CHIP legislation that appears headed for another narrowly-upheld presidential veto, showing the missteps on all sides that led to the impasse. The White House attacked it early and harshly, the Senate Republicans favoring it failed to make its case to the Bush administration, and House Democrats cut out House Republicans from the development of the bill. It all sounds like another happy day of gridlock:
They met almost every day in the spring and summer, a handful of powerful senators who had cleared their schedules to forge a bipartisan compromise providing health insurance to 10 million children.
It was a remarkable commitment of time for the senators, who sequestered themselves for two hours a day in the office of Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat whose conference room is decorated with an Old West motif and filled with small sculptures of cowboys and buffaloes.
But even before they finished their work, President Bush attacked it.
In a pre-emptive strike on June 27, Mr. Bush — standing before another Western image, an equestrian portrait of Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider — said the proposal would "cause huge increases in government spending" and lead to "government-run health care for every American."
The process used certainly seems rather questionable. While the Senate displayed remarkable comity and forged a compromise that resulted in a veto-proof majority, House Democrats decided to play a little hardball, especially after the first veto. Before they had given House Republicans at least the appearance of engagement, but after that, nothing but dictates. They combined the take-it-or-leave-it attitude with the launch of attack ads. They didn't target the conservatives who would not have voted for the scale of expansion demanded, but instead targeted the moderates whose votes they needed most.
The result? They actually lost votes, all but guaranteeing that the next veto would stand as well.
The Times' deconstruction doesn't tell anything that couldn't already be gleaned by alert observers. We already knew about the hardball that blew up in the faces of the bill's advocates. Newspapers had reported the competing allegations between Congress and the White House on the level of consultation provided to the Bush administration.
In fact, it doesn't cover the main hurdle between the White House and Congress. It actually leaves out a big chunk of the argument by failing to mention the tax funding of S-CHIP when it reports on the White House insistence on reviewing tax policy as a whole for a solution to a more moderate S-CHIP expansion. It also leaves out the debate over the scale of the expansion. Given that these two issues formed the actual policy debate over the proposal, that seems to be a rather large omission from the Times.
The S-CHIP proposal had serious flaws, and neither version of the bill addressed them. It added middle-class children to a program designed to subsidize health insurance for the poor, and it used cigarette taxes — a very regressive tax — to fund the difference. In order for the numbers to work out, the plan presumed a growth of cigarette smokers of around 22 million to fund the program for all ten years, despite a decline in smoking over the last few years, pushed by government anti-smoking campaigns. It was a fiscally irresponsible plan, and the White House had a more modest approach that would have expanded coverage to more poor children through tax incentives that Congress completely ignored.
The real story is the policy, not the personalities. That's why this S-CHIP expansion lost.
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