As a parent of now-grown children, there perhaps was nothing more terrifying than wondering if they would be able to get health care should I lose my job.
That thankfully never occurred. I had health insurance through my employer and could not be considered to be poor. But it is something that parents have to confront today who also are not poor but whose children are among the 9 million in the U.S. who are uninsured.
That is the rub of – and a central misunderstanding in — the debate over expanding the popular federally-funded State Childrens’ Health-Insurance Program and yet another instance in which the so-called compassionate conservatism of the Bush administration is nothing less than an attack on a beleaguered middle class.
Opponents of expanding S-CHIP tirelessly point out that the program would cover children whose family’s incomes put them squarely in the middle class as if that were some budget-busting giveaway – pork for parents, as it were – whereas the reality is far different:
Today in America, not just poor people need a leg up to get access to health care.
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