10.09.07

WCGOP Writes Letters - UPDATED

Posted in Take Action, Right Wing Lies, Health Care, Had Enough Yet?, Around The State, Around The Nation, Williamson County at 1:58 pm by wcnews

Imagine for a second that a newspaper in Williamson County would have printed a letter to the editor with this as the title:

Cruel Republicans and their Fascist nonsense

Imagine the outrage.

Well the Round Rock Leader (RRL) didn’t. Instead they printed the partisan ravings, and error infested talking points, of an officer of the Williamson County GOP. Go check it out. Whether the RRL knew the author was an officer of the party is not known.

The author spews the same ‘ol error-filled mantra we’ve been hearing since Bush and a few of his compassion-less minions decided insuring more children was a bad thing.

Here those claims will be debunked with excerpts form this post, GOP to Battle SCHIP Veto Override With Distortions. (There’s more debunking of GOP myths regarding SCHIP in the post and I recommend everyone read the whole thing).

• It’s socialized medicine

SCHIP does nothing to advance socialized medicine. This is a block grant program, under which states opting to receive federal funds run their own programs in compliance with federal rules. There is no “single payer,” and the program is not run by the federal government. The caregivers who actually provide the health care are generally private rather than government employees.

• “..redefines ‘children’ as individuals 25 years of age..”

This is a complete misnomer.

the SCHIP program is aimed at children. Adults are generally not eligible. Some states have in the past obtained waivers from the federal government (yes, the Bush administration) to extend benefits to certain adults, usually adults who are disabled, pregnant, or parents of eligible children. New waivers to provide coverage of adults without children has been prohibited since passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2006. The Bush administration likes to portray this as a major dimension of the program by emphasizing that about 600,000 adults are receiving benefits under SCHIP, but that is only a tenth of the six million recipients overall. This is fundamentally a program for uninsured children.

• Covers families that earn up to $83,000/year.

opponents of SHIP expansion insist that the program would extend to upper-middle class families. Yesterday, for example, President Bush said in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that the SCHIP bill “expands coverage, federal coverage, up to families earning $83,000 a year. That doesn’t sound poor to me.” However, that claim is patently misleading. The bill actually restricts SCHIP money to families earning no more than 300% of the federal poverty level, which means about $60,000 for a family of four. President Bush’s assertion is based on a waiver request by the State of New York that was in fact rejected by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Also needed mentioning is that we are all paying for these people’s health care already. In the form of higher insurance premiums. When they wind up going to the emergency room and using their current health care plan, as Bush calls it, that winds up costing us all more than if they would have had health insurance and gone to the doctor when it was just the sniffles.

While John Carter, (Don’t forget to contact him), and his minions in the WCGOP would like you to believe that anyone who is for expanding SCHIP is a communist that wants to give a bunch of 25 years old making $83,000 a year free health care, it just ain’t so.

[UPDATE]: Another big part of this that I forgot to mention is that this is a bipartisan bill/compromise.

First, there is no “Democratic” bill. The SCHIP bill that will be considered this week in the House and the Senate is a bipartisan conference report very similar to the Senate bill that received 68 votes.

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