The March Toward Mediocrity

President Bush has acknowledged his willingness to compromise on that SCHIP middle-class health care proposal that he vetoed last week. He simply wants the scope of the legislation limited to its original intent - to help poor kids.

The other side - the socialists - will have none of it.

Here's the New York Times:

An Overblown Fear About S-Chip
editorial

To hear the Bush administration tell it, expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program would entice hordes of families to drop their private coverage and put their children on the public dole. As the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael Leavitt, argued in a recent television appearance, states that cover middle-income children as well as the poor are essentially telling people to “cancel your private insurance and we’ll have the government pay for it.”

There are several things wrong with that claim. (link)

Let me stop here. A few paragraphs down, the editorialist accepts the claim as being fact:

Using a broader methodology and peering into the future, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill vetoed by President Bush would increase enrollment in S-chip and Medicaid by 5.8 million in 2012. Of that total, 3.8 million children would otherwise be uninsured and 2 million would be children who could have gotten private insurance in the absence of S-chip.

Even if that 1-in-3 substitution rate should turn out to be accurate, it is still far better than denying insurance to millions of American children.

If that estimate is inaccurate, it's because it is on the low side. Who wouldn't, given the chance, drop expensive health insurance for cheaper government-subsidized health coverage?

But beyond that, these people, if asked, would tell you that ALL American children should be covered by government-administered health care. So why the facade? Why limit the discussion to this SCHIP legislation? Why pretend that this is a reasonable proposition?

Why? Because Hillary taught them a valuable lesson. In 1993.

Americans don't want to be Canadians or Europeans. We don't want to have to go begging when it comes to our health care like they do. We don't want rationing. We want to maintain the finest health care delivery system ever devised by humankind.

But we can be enticed by that plea ... for the children.

And Hillary's pals know it.

So you'll see no compromise here. But you won't see any grandiose plans either. No HillaryCare. We no longer talk about helping everybody. But we no longer limit the discussion to helping the poor either. We've moved beyond that. We now talk about assisting children. Even those of the upper-middle classes. Next it'll be the hard-pressed urban dwellers. Farmers. GM workers. California.

And the system will be forever changed.

And fifty years from now, we'll be waiting in that long line at the doctor's office to receive our cold medicine and we'll be reading - longingly - that National Geographic article about what once was. And we'll ask ourselves how we let it slip away.

And we'll be asking the right people. We will have done it to ourselves.