S-CHIP Veto Upheld in House

By Rick Moran

Democrats in the House vowed to bring a slightly modified S-CHIP bill to the floor in the next two weeks after failing to override the President's veto of the expanded children's health insurance program:

Democrats came up 13 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override in the House. But moments after the roll call, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised that “in the next two weeks we will send the president another bill that insures coverage for 10 million children.”

Just what will be different in the new measure remains to be seen, but Democrats have been hinting that they’ll make only modest changes — perhaps adding more firm income caps for program eligibility while more clearly banning benefits for illegal immigrants.

The goal for Democrats — at least for the short term — is not to compromise on the $35 billion increase in the program or the number of children covered, but tweak the bill so that just enough politically vulnerable Republicans feel comfortable changing their votes.

Pressure on politically vulnerable Republicans will be intense thanks to some targeted ads being placed in many of those districts by Moveon.Org, lambasting the GOP House members for voting to "destroy" the program. Of course, no such thing is contemplated. The President and the Republicans support SCHIP in its current form, only opposing the $$35 billion expansion of the bill that would include families 400% above the poverty level - in some cases, giving families coverage who make more than $80,000 per year.

The expansion would also drop the citizenship requirement by making it ridiculously easy for illegal immigrants to get coverage. Also, the fact that many states allow adults to be covered under the program and the GOP wants to insure SCHIP benefits children only is another sticking point.

The President is trying to work with Democrats to come up with a compromise that would expand the program to cover some of the additional families - along with more stringent caps on income and perhaps even an asset test - but it appears the Democrats are much more interested in making this a political issue than they are in actually subsidizing children's health insurance. They believe they can ride the issue to victory next November.

It is possible the Democrats will succeed in peeling enough Republicans away from the President to override the President's veto. If they do, it will not sit well with the base of the party who see the expansion of the program as just one more indication that the Democrats want to foist a government run health care system on the American people.

Come 2009, we will probably see if that's true or not.