Prometheus 6

The (Offspring of) Motherhood Bill

Congress’s Republican minority leaders are picking the wrong fight in suddenly attacking a notably bipartisan push to expand health insurance coverage to hundreds of thousands of children of the working poor. A Democratic plan to renew the highly successful program and enlarge it through financing paid by higher tobacco taxes was understandably attracting support from rank-and-file Republicans — at least until President Bush and their caucus leaders began denouncing it as a foot in the door for some dark government design for socialized medicine.

The expansion is hardly that. It is a needed boost for a proven joint federal-state effort that epitomizes voters’ growing concern about the national neglect of health care coverage. Meanwhile, the White House’s proposal for only a meager increase in financing — at a time of spiraling health care costs — could lead to hundreds of thousands of children being dropped from the program and provide no help at all for the more than eight million children who have no health coverage.

For the Republican leadership, ideology trumps any such concerns. “Dragging people out of private health insurance to put them into a government-run program is ‘Hillary care’ come back,” cried the House Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, defending the profit-centric insurance industry as if it offered affordable coverage for these youngsters in the first place. His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, joined in the alarum, decrying “an entire government takeover” of health care.

The two leaders may be on message at the White House, where President Bush is foolishly threatening a veto. They seem way off message for the American public and even their own party caucuses, where the ghost of the old M word (moderate!) glimmers as the next election approaches. They are rightly asking why they should oppose such a successful family-values program.