The goal of government.
George Will writes about how often small government programs become behemoths. Case in point: SCHIP.
By a vote of 289 to 139, with 40 Republicans joining the majority, the House, in the process of reauthorizing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, doubled the funding, thereby transforming it through “mission creep.” SCHIP’s purpose, when it was enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1997, was to subsidize state governments as they subsidize health care for families too affluent to be eligible for Medicaid but not affluent enough to afford health insurance. Because any measure acquires momentum when it is identified as for “the children,” SCHIP was said to be for “poor children” or children of “the working poor.”
In 2007, after President Bush proposed a $5 billion increase in SCHIP, the House voted for a $50 billion increase but receded to the Senate’s proposed $35 billion, which became the definition of moderation. That compromise, which Bush successfully vetoed, at first would have extended SCHIP eligibility to some households with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty line (up to $83,000 for a family of four), and more than $30,000 above the median household income ($50,233). So people with incomes higher than most people’s became eligible for a program supposedly for low-income people. Call that compassionate arithmetic.
The new expansion, which is vengeance for Bush’s veto, is mission gallop: It will make it much easier for some states to extend SCHIP eligibility to children from families earning up to $84,800. Furthermore, to make “poor” an extremely elastic concept, generous “income disregards” are allowed. Families can, depending on their state’s policies, subtract from their income calculation what they spend on rent or mortgage or heating or food or transportation or some combination of these. So children in some families with incomes well over $100,000 will be eligible.
Grace-Marie Turner, a student of health-care policies, says this SCHIP expansion is sensible — if your goal is quickly to get as many people on public coverage as possible and to have children grow up thinking that it is normal for them to get their health insurance from the government. That is the goal.