By now, President George Walker Bush may have already vetoed the bill, passed with bipartisan support in both House and Senate, to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The president says he supports the general concept of assisting needy families with children in getting medical care, but congressional Democrats have expanded the program to include too many families, including some that could presumably afford private insurance.
You can see the political lines being drawn here. Many Democrats favor some form of “government-run health care,” and expanding the children’s program could be seen as another step in that direction. So a Republican president who believes in private health care would logically push back and try to keep the program from expanding.
However, that logic could be extended to many other federal programs, now used by people of all economic classes. And if that happened, we might see announcements like these:
“Our surveys show that many hunters could easily afford to go to private game hunting preserves like those we have in Texas. Allowing them to use public lands to harvest public game is another step toward ‘government- owned hunting areas,’ and must be resisted by all good Americans who believe in free enterprise and individual initiative,” the president said.
He added that “the vast majority of big-game hunters on public land could well afford to go to the supermarket and buy beef, mutton and pork. In these times of budgetary restraint, we shouldn’t be subsidizing them.”
“When you look at it closely,” a Justice official explained, “these guys can afford their own food, shelter, clothing and medical care, even after we’ve fined them. So why should we put them up at public expense?”
The official said the inspiration came from the White House after President Bush commuted the jail sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby following his convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice.
Citing national-security considerations, he declined to provide many details, but pointed out that “there are thousands of Americans who could afford to hire their own Blackwater force, and under the old system, they were being lured into a government- run protection system that involved communication monitoring, airport screening and the like.”
He added, “The original intent of this program was to further democracy and capitalism worldwide, thereby eliminating terrorism and fanaticism. It was not to have Americans looking to their government for help.”
“As I have often stated,” the president explained, “government-run health care is something we must limit to those who can’t afford anything else. Our representatives and senators can certainly afford their own private plans, and they should be setting a good example.”
Alas, I suspect we’ll never read of such things. The president, like those senators and representatives who oppose “government-run health-care,” are perfectly happy to have it for themselves, even if they think we need to be protected from it.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
