President Bush today has delivered on his promise to veto Senate's $35 billion expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program - an expansion he feels is too close to universal, single-payer healthcare.
Congressional Democrats have said they will seek an override of Bush's veto. The SCHIP reauthorization bill received enough votes in Senate to clinch an override, but fell short of the magic number in the House.
Lawmakers mulled options for expansion over the past few months, and decided on a tweaked version of the Senate Finance Committee's proposal to reauthorize the federal program for five years and allocate $35 billion to its growth. The funding would come from a 39-cent per-pack levy on the federal tobacco tax.
Nearly 6.6 million children received healthcare insurance under SCHIP since its 2002 inception, and some 10 million more stand to receive coverage under the current bill, supporters have said.
The Bush administration has expressed its concerns that the expanded program would cover not only poor children, but middle- and upper-middle-class children who already have private insurance.
"Congress made a decision to expand eligibility up to $80,000 (family income). That's not the intent of the program," President Bush said last week. "I believe this is a step towards federalization of healthcare... That's why I'm going to veto the bill."
Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt noted that 90 percent of children in families with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty line already have private insurance.
However, the Senate Finance Committee argued that the legislation would not aim to expand eligibility on the federal level. New York is the only state that has announced plans to expand eligibility as high as $80,000 (or 400 percent of the federal poverty line).
Eight states this week announced that they would sue the Bush administration for attempting to curb their efforts to expand eligibility levels.
Leavitt last week said that while eligibility would remain at states' discretion regardless of how the program is expanded, the administration encourages states to prioritize their poorest children.
Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), co-author of the original Senate bill, criticized the administration's proposal to allocate only $5 billion to SCHIP.
"According to (The Congressional Budget Office), over a million children would lose coverage if we simply reauthorized SCHIP at the assumed baseline," he said in a floor statement last week. "Who among us would go home and tell your constituents you voted to reauthorize the SCHIP program, but over a million kids lost coverage(?)"