Using the Children as Human Shields
By Repair Man Jack Posted in Policy — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Nothing a politician can do is more unethical and cheap than using the children as human shields to prevent people from debating the hoary details of their disingenuous and deleterious policy agendas. It is with this in mind that I condemn the entire Democratic Party media campaign to enact the S-CHIP reauthorization at much higher cost and much lower efficiency that the previous iteration of the same program.
The President had no problem with reauthorizing the S-CHIP Program to continue insuring low income children, but for the poverty warriors seeking a fight with The White House, only insuring poor children wasn’t good enough. The maudlin melodrama enacted by the supporters of S-CHIP must have driven the sales figures for Pepto-Bismol and Tums through the roof. Children pulling wagons of petitions on behalf of S-CHIP paraded in front of The White House. They must have been signed in Crayola hues of orange, pink and green; just to get the propaganda pitch dead on.
Nancy Pelosi even cared enough to pray for President Bush. She wanted him to change his cold-hearted determination to veto a bill that would increase the unit cost per child insured by 72%. She can’t believe the utter cruelty of expecting families that earn as much as $83,000 to pay for insuring their own offspring.
Imagine the unmitigated brutality of not using a children’s health insurance program to pay for insurance until the little sprouts turn 25. Yep, that’s what Nancy was praying for. Little Junior covered by Children’s Health Insurance until four years after his first legal Coke and Jack Daniels. I somehow doubt any of the cute little tykes pulling wagons on the White House Lawn were twenty-four year-olds, sporting goatees and MS-13 tattoos.
Perhaps, the Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen who wrote this brilliant proposal should sit down and talk to an actuary. Life changes between the ages of six and twenty-four. Children in Middle School usually don’t drive, drink or engage in sexual practices of any sort unless something is very wrong with the picture, or it is directed by Roman Polanski.
Pre-School children don’t have HIV unless Mommy and Daddy made them that way. They tend not to wreck very many cars, snort much cocaine and don’t even crack open an ice-cold Bud. Their insurable risk is considerably lower than that of a person in their early twenties. They also don’t have pregnancies and all the wonderful issues that go along pre-natal care.
In essence, this S-CHIP program can’t rewrite reality no matter how much it wants to call itself children’s insurance. People who are adults will make adult mistakes under adult circumstances and thus cost a whole lot more to insure and clean up after. This is probably why the program has the huge cost spike in relation to the numbers of additional children insured. The new S-CHIP insures an awful lot of adults, and to remain solvent, it has to take in money accordingly.
This brings us to another sordid moral practice that the Democrats trotted out the children to make the country elide over. They tax smokers to fund the program. Delightful. They milk a bunch of addicted consumers to pay for an expansion of the Federal Government. Where would progressive politics be without the Tobacco Industry? As Christopher Buckley infamously wrote, thank you for smoking.
In a logical world of profound, philosophical debate, no politician would ever step up to the microphone and announce the following.
“My Fellow Senators,”
“I intend to insure people 25 years old and call it Children’s Health Insurance. I intend to extend benefits to people making $83,000 per year in income in the name of fighting poverty. I intend to extend these benefits to non-citizens residing either legally or illegally in the country. Letting more people drop anchor babies makes America a better neighbor.”
“I intend for this program to be 72% more expensive per recipient to operate. Not enough money has been wasted to put this program in the major leagues. We sure know how to take care of that in a jiffy.”
“And to make this program a perfect symbol of the new era of American Government, we’ll finance much of this debacle by taxing a group of consumers who are addicted to a narcotic. You see demand elasticity is the enemy of the sales and excise tax collector. We need people who will fiend without the product, so that we have a perpetual source of new revenue.”
“So I urge you all now to pass this for the Children! God bless R.J. Rey…er, I mean The United States of America!”
No, that would be suicidal honesty. Instead, we get the cute little kids, forced to miss school, to provide propaganda shielding to an absolutely horrible piece of legislation. Pray for The Honorable Nancy Pelosi. She’ll need that and a lot of sweat equity in the House Gymnasium, if she wants to stand a chance of fitting through the eye of a needle.