About Bull-SCHIP and Nationalized Healthcare: See, A Bunch of People Told You So
Here’s one of ‘em, from the aptly screen-names “dgreatone”, at the now-dormant Wide Open blog on September 26 (misspelling corrected):
Of course, the SCHIP is one of many attempts to nibble around the edges and gradually move the nation from private health care to government healthcare. After all, how many government programs are doing it “for the children”?
Jeff Coryell, one of the four Wide Open bloggers, begged to differ in a subsequent comment:
However, I obviously disagree that SCHIP is bad or that it is a step toward “socialized medicine.” It’s about covering kids who don’t have insurance coverage now, not supplanting private insurance.
Not quite, Jeff.
Former Iowa Governor and early presidential race dropout Tom Vilsack, one of Hillary Clinton’s earlier endorsers, let the cat out of the bag, as Michelle Malkin notes (audio is at link):
Transcript:
“I think there is going to be a commitment to universal coverage. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a sector by sector process. I think you either need to go in whole hog or not. We tried to sort of squeeze the middle here with doing children and doing seniors, and trying to squeeze it. If anything happens, it would more likely look something like this: you would extend eligibility for children from 200% of poverty to 300% of poverty, and create resources to insure the parents of those children.â€
I must ask Jeff and others who argued similarly: Did you know this, or were you fooled? If the former, why were you pretending? If the latter, how does it feel to be duped?
Hi Tom –
Vilsack’s remarks are obviously newsworthy. But I don’t see them as letting the cat out of the bag. It is hardly a secret that the Democrats generally favor and support some kind of broadened or universal health care system in the United States. It is openly discussed and debated, Hillary and Obama went at it the other night in Nevada, and may even be a plank in the party platform. It was years ago when Harry Truman campaigned on the issue. I just wonder how we will pay for it — where is the money going to come from? — if there is universal or national health care of some kind. So, I doubt if any Democrats were fooled or duped that the party, or its leaders, would like to expand various health care programs to cover and include more Americans. I believe that is pretty much dogma . . .
Comment by Bill Sloat — November 19, 2007 @ 7:22 am
#1 Bill, Assuming what you say is true, then the claims that SCHIP expansion isn’t just another incremental step towards “universal health care” have always been false. The idea was to fool Republicans, not Dems.
Comment by TBlumer — November 19, 2007 @ 9:14 am