Amid worsening national economic conditions, the middle ground has never seemed further away for advocates of expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
President Bush on Wednesday saw his second veto of Congressional Democrats' SCHIP expansion legislation sustained as the House voted 260 to 152 against a veto override.
Factoring into the House's decision were economic concerns on both sides of the aisle. Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) echoed Bush's concerns that the new bill would be used to allow families with incomes of up to $75,000 into a public payer program.
"We're going to come back on this floor in the next week or two with a $150 billion dollar economic stimulus package to get us out of a recession. We need the money for that, so we don't want to be squandering money to provide health insurance for those who can afford to do it for themselves," Gingrey said.
Many House Democrats disagreed that the recession should restrain SCHIP expansion. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) said SCHIP expansion "becomes more urgent now that we are in a recession-perhaps in free fall. We should provide this safety net for families; it probably is the most urgent concern of a parent."
The vetoed bill would have allocated an additional $35 billion over five years to the public program, which provides insurance for some 6.6 million uninsured children. The expansion would have increased the scope of coverage to nearly 10 million children, supporters say.
But the price tag for SCHIP - which would have been nearly $60 billion total - proved too high for President Bush, who voiced concerns last month that the program would be used to channel more Americans into a single-payer healthcare scheme.
In his arguments against a veto override, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) alluded to the House's failed override attempt of Bush's first veto in October.
"Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," he said. "He must have been foreshadowing the 110th Congress' votes on SCHIP. Just because it is a new year does not mean bad policy magically becomes good policy."
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urged her peers to override the President's veto on Wednesday morning.
"In the last few days, we've all been working together in a bipartisan way to come up with an economic stimulus package. The recognition that we need a stimulus package points to the need further for this SCHIP legislation to become law," she said.
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) was fierce in defending the House's decision to once again sustain the President's veto in light of the implications of the expansion bill.
"By a vote of 260-152, Republicans have said again that we will not allow the majority to hijack this important program with an irresponsible, ill-targeted expansion," he said. "Today's vote is no different than the votes the Democratic Congress held in the past where they've chosen to put politics over policy. Every dollar they want to spend on a middle-income adult is a dollar they take away from a low-income child."