An uncaring president

saxo-archive

Thursday, Jan. 3, 2008 | midnight

President Bush has signed legislation that extends into 2009 a state-federal program that provides health insurance coverage to poor children -- a program the president has twice refused to expand.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program currently provides coverage to about 6 million children in low-income families. Congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans spent much of 2007 trying to expand the program's coverage to 10 million children. But Bush vetoed both attempts to do so, saying expansion would amount to government-funded health care for children in the upper-middle class.

On Saturday Bush signed a measure that will continue providing coverage to children already enrolled in this important program -- including about 38,000 in Nevada -- through March 2009. But it was a minimal effort on Bush's part, illustrating how little this president cares about the health and welfare of the nation's poor children.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she and other Democrats have no intention of giving up on the effort to expand coverage to 10 million children, but given Bush's adamant opposition to an expansion of the program it is an issue that likely will fall to Bush's White House successor to address.

It does not take a rocket scientist to see that failing to provide poor children with health care coverage -- and, as a result, limiting their access to preventive care -- costs a community and taxpayers more in the long term. Children who lack insurance are more likely to be taken to emergency rooms in later stages of illness, and obviously hospital medical care is more costly than a visit to the doctor's office.

Expanding this program would have shown real leadership and compassion on the part of the president, but those are qualities sorely lacking in George W. Bush.