Light up for the Kids

Ten days after making a splash with a clever commercial attacking Congress's plan to fund SCHIP via a tobacco tax, the mysterious nicolai1951—whose contempt-as-advocacy wit reminds me of fellow YouTube satirist abrad2345—returns with a second video. As Rob Bluey writes, "This one is even funnier than the first."

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The Daily Digest

1. Ruth Marcus comes to Anita Hill's defense against Clarence Thomas:

First, Hill did not wait 10 years to complain about his behavior. Susan Hoerchner, a Yale Law School classmate of Hill's, described how she complained of sexual harassment while working for Thomas, saying the EEOC chairman had "repeatedly asked her out . . . but wouldn't seem to take 'no' for an answer." Ellen Wells, a friend, said Hill had come to her, "deeply troubled and very depressed," with complaints about Thomas's inappropriate behavior. John Carr, a lawyer, said that Hill, in tears, confided that "her boss was making sexual advances toward her." American University law professor Joel Paul said Hill had told him in 1987 that she had left the EEOC because she had been sexually harassed by her supervisor.

Second, Hill was not the only former subordinate of Thomas's with complaints. Former EEOC employee Angela Wright described how Thomas pressured her to date him, showed up uninvited at her apartment and asked her breast size. "Clarence Thomas would say to me, 'You know you need to be dating me. . . . You're one of the finest women I have on my staff," Wright told Senate investigators.

2. John Dickerson highlights the incurious mind of George W. Bush:

In his new book, former Mexican President Vicente Fox calls Bush "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life." A recently released recorded conversation with former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar confirms that. "I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right," Bush says about going to war with Iraq. "I'm a person at peace with myself." Self-confidence is now a warning sign for myopia, insulation, and the inability to accurately assess the world around you.

3. Harold Meyerson rails against Bush's veto of S-CHIP:

Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own . . . would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care". . . .

By the same logic, no more public schools should be built in well-off communities.

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GOP Health Care: Democrat-Lite

David Hogberg counts the reasons:

In 1986, a Republican-controlled Senate approved and a Republican President signed into law COBRA and EMTALA, two major expansions of government regulation of the health care industry. In the mid-1990s, a Republican-controlled Congress approved another big expansion of government regulation called HIPAA and a new government health insurance program, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). In 2003, the GOP Congress and Republican President Bush created a huge new entitlement with the Medicare Prescription Drug Program. Now some Republicans in the Senate, specifically Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, are leading the charge for a big expansion of SCHIP.

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The Problem of Vetoing S-CHIP

Time contextualizes the p.r.:

The president who has famously never vetoed a spending bill is suddenly concerned with an increase that amounts to 2.4% of the $933 billion budget he requested for fiscal 2008. The man who created the $140 billion Medicare prescription drug program is threatening to veto a bill that would grow state children's health care programs by $35 billion. And out of the blue Bush is suddenly talking entitlement reform again, two years after his push to overhaul Social Security died.

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Take This Bill and SCHIP It

Deroy augments and adds to my arguments:

1. "Washington already lets 14 states cover 670,000 'boys' and 'girls,' up to age 25, some of whom have been drinking legally for four years and voting for seven. Ninety-two percent of Minnesota’s SCHIP budget insures adults."

2. Hillary's "proposal, like the House Democrats’ bill, would cover children in families up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL), double today’s target. Thus, a family of four making $82,600 could receive federal-government medicine. Meanwhile—the Heritage Foundation’s Rea Hederman estimates—70,000 'American families are both poor and high-income—simultaneously.' They qualify for SCHIP and the Alternative Minimum Tax."

3. "77 percent of children between double and triple FPL and 89 percent between 300 and 400 percent of FPL already have private health insurance, notes Cato Institute scholar Michael Cannon."

4. "Senate Democrats would fund this extravaganza via a 156 percent cigarette-tax hike—from 39 cents to $1 per pack. Heritage forecasts that 22 million new smokers would have to light up by 2017 to keep SCHIP afloat. So, SCHIP promises to improve children’s health while exploiting adult tobacco addiction."

5. The NYT reports that in addition to redefining eligibility, the bill also redefines geography, by quietly instructing federal officials to treat certain hospitals as if they were located elsewhere, where compensation from Medicare is substantially higher.

6. Bluey notes that language eliminating the Medicare trigger has been stripped out.

Update (8/30/07):

7. Cato is hosting a Hill briefing on September 13, nicely titled "Sinking SCHIP." The event's description is equally well-stated: "Congress has approved legislation that will increase the tax on tobacco, which is paid mostly by poor people, to fund government health insurance for nonpoor people."

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The SCHIP Debate

Legislation: H.R. 3162, the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act of 2007.

Background: Established in 1997, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP, pronounced "s-chip") is a partnership between the states and federal government to insure poor children. The program is up for reauthorization by September 30, but big-government liberals want not just to renew it, but also to expand it.

The problem is, the expansion contradicts SCHIP’s original, limited intent.

First, it redefines eligibility by recognizing people up to 21 as “children.”

Second, it extends coverage to a family of four with an income of $82,600—hardly a “low-income” group.

Third, by removing the requirement for reauthorization, it transforms SCHIP from its current block grant status into a permanent entitlement, like Medicaid, which is automatically funded every year, regardless of congressional approval.

Thus, what’s being proposed is not reauthorization but repudiation. SCHIP was intended to insure kids. Now it’s being exploited to encompass adults and even wealthy families. Instead of distorting language and creating new entitlement programs, we should reaffirm sensible age, income and reauthorization parameters.

Furthermore, the proposed expansion crowds out private insurers in favor of government health care. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill will cause nearly two million people to abandon market-based medicine for Washington-based mandates.

In order to avoid caricature, this debate is not about whether to insure poor children. This debate is about how to insure them: not via welfare-style coverage, but via market forces that have facilitated the world’s most advanced drugs and cures.

Finally, at a time of ballooning deficits, expanding SCHIP makes a mockery of fiscal responsibility. According to CBO estimates, the bill will cost nearly $60 billion over 10 years, which is 10 times President Bush’s budget request.

Moreover, in order to finance all this, smokers would be hit with an extra half dollar in taxes for every pack of cigarettes they buy. Such a sin tax is inequitable and regressive.

Democrats are picking up where Hillary Clinton left off 14 years ago. Their Hillary Care-lite legislation deserves the same fate as hers: ignominious defeat.

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The Daily Digest

Ciutadella, Menorca

Earlier this week, John Boehner said he agreed with me that (current) earmark reform is more symbolic than substantive—that the real fat to cut lies in military procurement and entitlement spending. Now the NYT reports another reason to deprioritize this small-potatoes reform: "Because everyone can see who is receiving what, rank-and-file members are clamoring for their districts to obtain a bigger share of the goodies. Similarly, constituents in home districts are becoming bolder as the earmarking process becomes less mysterious."

As dramatized in the Sopranos ("And that's a sickness, to fidget?"), educators have long been mis- and overdiagnosing children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). As quoted in Time, Judith Rapoport, author of the landmark book The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing, explains why many such diagnoses are erroneous: The key to diagnosing OCD is how great an impact the behavior has on your life. "You have to show longstanding interference with function, and that eliminates most people."

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, likes to profile up-and-coming leaders of the GOP. His latest subject is South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who many conservatives, as distinct from Republicans, admire for his commitment to limited government. "Whatever government doesn't have to do, it should let the private sector do," Sanford tells Barnes (counterarguments here).

Mike Huckabee's campaign manager tells Sam Brownback to shut up and grow up: "It's time for Sam Brownback to stop whining and start showing some of the Christian character he seems to always find lacking in others. He has attacked Governor Huckabee for something that a Huckabee supporter said in an email sent to two individuals. The person who originated the email has apologized and is not a member of the Huckabee staff. For Brownback to claim that the Governor 'owes him an apology' is nonsense and indicates that if Brownback is going to fall to pieces every time a supporter of the Governor says something he doesn't like, he clearly isn't tough enough to be President."

Update: It's not only Huckabee whom Brownback is lashing out at. He's also attacking, via autocalls, Tancredo and Romney, for their connections to Planned Parenthood.

Update: More Brownback brazenness (hat tip: Matt Lewis): the self-proclaimed Christian candidate humbly declares himself, via press release (which is apparently not online but was e-mailed to supporters), the winner of yesterday's ABC News Iowa debate. As Matt notes, the press release does not quote any outside pundits but is the opinion purely of the Brownback campaign.

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The Daily Digest: Nanny State Watch

Do we really need a surgeon general? We do not, argues Cato's Michael Tanner, for "nowadays the surgeon general is little more than the 'national nanny,' nagging us to stop smoking, lose weight, and never leave home without a condom."

Speaking of the nanny state, a town in Louisiana is about to outlaw sagging pants. Penalties include up to six months in jail. Why don't they just outlaw puberty?

IBD rehashes the case for making English the official language of the United States, which would require all government meetings, publications and transactions to be done in English, with common-sense exceptions such as in health care and judicial proceedings.

Anne Applebaum observes the difference between Obama's first book—Dreams from My Father—and his second, The Audacity of Hope: Dreams was written 15 years ago, before Obama became a political candidate of any kind, whereas Audacity is his recent "elect-me-president" book. The result: the former is "written with real elegance" and "full of unexpected observations," while the latter is cliched-cloaked and platitude-puffed.

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The Daily Digest

Scattered around the Capitol, down closed-off hallways and behind nondescript doors marked only with an "S" or a "H" and a number, lurk one of Congress's closeted perks: private offices, or hideaways, where members can catch some sleep, twist a few legislative arms, and invite an eager-beaver constituent at the end of the day.

Mike Turk, who was recently tapped to lead Fred Thompson's e-team, lauds the federalist credentials of his new boss.

The good old choice-championing Rudy is back (and by "choice," I mean the choices of a free-market economy). According to the WSJ, "He envisions a [health-care] system where neither state regulations nor federal tax law push people into expensive plans rich in benefits. Rather, health insurance should be more like car insurance, he said, where people pay out of pocket for minor repairs and maintenance."

Amnesty International's new Eyes on Darfur Web site "leverages the power of high-resolution satellite imagery to provide unimpeachable evidence of the atrocities being committed in Darfur."

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Fisking Sicko

Let the fun begin! (Technically, Fred Thompson got here first, and brilliantly so.)

From the NYT:

Having practiced medicine in both Cuba and the United States, Dr. [Leonel] Cordova [who defected to the latter in 2000] has an unusual perspective for comparison.

“Actually there are three systems,” Dr. Cordova said, because Cuba has two: one is for party officials and foreigners like those Mr. Moore brought to Havana. “It is as good as this one here, with all the resources, the best doctors, the best medicines, and nobody pays a cent,” he said.

But for the 11 million ordinary Cubans, hospitals are often ill equipped and patients “have to bring their own food, soap, sheets—they have to bring everything.” And up to 20,000 Cuban doctors may be working in Venezuela, creating a shortage in Cuba.

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E-Rx

RevolutionHealth.com doesn't officially launch until Thursday, but, having been founded and funded by the genius who launched American Online, Steve Case, I'm expecting big things.

The venture's mission is well-stated—"to give consumers more choice and control over their health care, enabling all of us to live healthier, better lives"—and its ambition—to be "the most trusted brand in health" information—is intriguing.

As far as I can tell, the site's most useful aspect is its individualization: by creating a free account, you can store, privately or publicly, your health history, like what pills you take or what allergies you have.

Another exciting health-IT proposal comes from the Bethesda-based firm Prematics, whose pitch is as follows. Nearly all new prescriptions are written the old-fashioned way—with a "ballpoint pen, clipboard, [and] rows and rows of paper files," as Newt Gingrich recently put it. This process is riddled with error and inefficiency—often fatally so, as is the case when a sloppy "5" looks likes a "6" or a period is misplaced.

Using a device it dubs an iPod for prescriptions, Prematics seeks to relegate this era of doctors' handwriting to museums. Say goodbye to hieroglyphs and say hello to Times New Roman.

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