Oliver Twist Had Better Not Get Sick

Harold Meyerson, columnist at The Washington Post, has a good column about the Bush administration's efforts to limit the coverage government can provide to children. (To be fair, the Democratic-led Congress was too interested in leaving for the summer break last week to bother too much with this issue either.) Meyerson asks whether Lynne Cheney's love for the classics and Bill Bennett's urging to read the great moral tales have actually rubbed off in a negative way upon the Bush administration. He notes the example of Oliver Twist asking for more porridge at the orphanage and being punished for the audacity of wanting more gruel just because he was hungry. According to Meyerson, the administration's policy towards children's healthcare amounts to the same thing--a Dickensonian orphanage that cares not for its children.

Guidelines pushed for by the Bush administration came clearly out of the pocket of the health insurance lobby. Essentially, they block the working poor from receiving government help, even in the case of dramatic health costs for emergency measures. If you live below the poverty line (a household income of about $20K) you can get government assistance from health care without too much trouble--above that and you better pray for a miracle. As any social worker or social service provider or church leader that actually works with low-income people can tell you, one of the leading factors--if not the largest factor--in working poor families declaring bankruptcy, defaulting on mortgages, etc. is because of medical costs that they cannot pay. Millions of families in our country are one serious medical problem away from complete financial ruin.

For those interested in specifics, here's one onerous one that Meyerson cites:

The administration fears that parents in the designated income groups will forgo enrolling their children in private plans. States that wish to provide insurance for children in families with income at 250 percent of the poverty level, Smith told the New York Times' Robert Pear, "must establish a minimum of a one-year period of uninsurance for individuals" before children become eligible. They also must show that the number of children insured by private employers has not dropped by more than two percentage points over the preceding five years.

In other words, if a state wants to insure a chronically ill 2-year-old whose parents' employer has dropped his health coverage, it has to wait until he's a chronically ill 3-year-old.

If you make less than $50k a year and your employer doesn't provide health insurance, you had better hope your child doesn't get sick, because the federal government will not help you and has taken steps to make sure that state governments will not help you either.

With this type of immoral disregard for children in our country (not to mention their parents), are we really that far from portrait Dickens painted 150 years ago? For those of us who follow a savior that claim to follow a savior that loved children, these moves against health care for children are unacceptable.

Grace and Peace,

Chase