Fixing the Bush messes

When Americans elected Barack Obama as president and gave Democrats solid majorities in both houses of Congress, they did so to accomplish the same goal: Change the direction America was headed in. They didn’t want more of the same failed policies of Bush/Cheney, they wanted change.

This week America took a major step in fixing the messes left by Bush/Cheney and the Republicans when President Obama signed the S-CHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) reauthorisation act into law.

S-CHIP provides health insurance coverage to children in poor and low-income families, but in October of 2007 Bush vetoed the reauthorisation of S-CHIP. At the time I said: “Of all the lame-brained nonsense coming from the Bush White House, his veto of the S-CHIP measure to provide health insurance to children from low-income families, has got to be among the most inexplicable.”

The Republican mantra in 2007 was that S-CHIP was some sort of socialised medicine by stealth because it would have made more children eligible for coverage. This year, some Republicans continued to push this bizarrely absurd idea. In their “let them eat cake” attitude, Bush and the Republicans said sick poor children could always go a hospital emergency room—the most expensive form of healthcare there is.

The new Congress moved in January to get the programme reauthorized, including an expansion to cover about 4 million more children. To fund it, the bill raised the cigarette tax by 62 cents (today, about NZ$1.16) per pack, thereby funding one pubic health need by taxing a public health problem. If ever there was a win-win situation, that’s it.

President Obama signed the final version of the law on February 4. This is only one of the Bush/Cheney messes that President Obama and Congress have either fixed or are in the process of fixing. Helping children from poor and low-income families finally get the healthcare they need? That’s what I call change I can believe in.