Senator Kerry published the following OpEd piece in the Boston Herald on July 23, 2007. The bill that he is referencing in this article is up for a consideration on the Senate floor this week.

Children’s health must be nation’s priority

By John Kerry

For a parent, nothing is more important than the health of our children, and nothing more frightening than the fear that when a child gets sick, a visit to the doctor is out of reach.

This week, Washington has a great opportunity to insure millions more children among the 9 million who currently lack health insurance.

Instead, when it comes to insuring all of America’s children, a cautious Congress and a stubborn Republican president are offering the voters a disappointing choice: do far too little, or do nothing at all.

I intend to fight for a better option and will ask my colleagues in the Senate to vote on a measure adding $50 billion over to the next five years to the S-CHIP program — a wildly-successful children’s health care program that today insures 6.6 million kids.

The current modest bipartisan proposal would spend $35 billion over five years — far too little.

We have been modest where we should have been bold. If we, as senators, don’t stand for insuring every child in America, then what do we stand for? If America can spend $10 billion each month in Iraq, surely we can also spend $10 billion each year on children’s health.

Even more troubling, the president has launched a disinformation campaign to denounce this bill as a larger Democratic strategy or plot to massively expand federalized medicine. He has stubbornly pledged to veto a bill he hasn’t even read. Apparently, confronted with a bipartisan compromise to extend health care coverage to half of the 9 million American children without insurance today, the president sees only a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

The S-CHIP program is not some Democratic plot to socialize medicine. It’s a successful bipartisan initiative passed by a Republican Congress under President Clinton. It covers children from families whose income is just above Medicaid eligibility but far too low to afford private insurance coverage.

And it’s not government-run, either: the vast majority of S-CHIP enrollees receive their coverage through private insurance plans.

Today, Republican governors like Mitch Daniels in Indiana — Bush’s former budget chief — have done more to implement and expand it than even some of their Democratic counterparts. These governors understand that, with the cost of private insurance for that same family approaching $12,000 per year, the president is wrong to say that S-CHIP would be pushing families like these from private to government health care. For most eligible families, the real choice is this: S-CHIP or no health care at all.

Who benefits from S-CHIP? People like 9-year-old Alexsiana Lewis of Springfield, who was losing her vision due to a rare eye disease. Alexsiana’s mother edra lost her health insurance benefits when she cut back her hours to care for her daughter.

“If I didn’t have S-CHIP-funded MassHealth right now, my daughter would be blind,” Dedra said.

This boils down to a question of priorities. Washington politicians like to talk about values, but here’s a simple test of who actually values families:

How much is it worth to you to insure every child in America?

America stands behind our children and Democrats in Congress should not bend to pressure from the White House, Republicans, or special interests.

Today the president calls a $35 billion investment in children’s health care a massive expansion of federalized medicine. I call it a good start. Now let’s get to work on a bipartisan down payment on universal health care for all of our children.

The Boston Globe, on July 12th of this year, also published an editorial questioning the priorities of the Bush Administration in regards to the S-CHIP funding. The Globe’s editorial strongly backed increasing the funding bill currently under consideration in the Senate. The editorial said:

It is hard to believe that anyone would oppose giving health care to sick children on the grounds that it is a slippery slope to “federalized medicine.” Yet that is just what President Bush is saying about expanding S-Chip, the 10-year-old Children’s Health Insurance Program that is up for reauthorization.

S-Chip was enacted in 1997 to provide health insurance for children who were poor, but not poor enough to be covered by Medicaid. The program gets federal and state funding (the S stands for state). And according to the Congressional Budget Office, S-Chip has succeeded: the proportion of children without insurance has fallen by one-fourth, from 22.5 percent in 1996 to 16.9 percent in 2005.

In his 2008 budget, President Bush proposed an increase of $5 billion over five years. But this is not enough. Just to maintain its current enrollment, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that S-Chip would need an increase from 2007 to 2012 of $14 billion.

Letting S-Chip tread water is a mistake. It would deny coverage to an estimated 2 million children who are eligible but not enrolled. And it ignores a larger problem: Of the nation’s 79 million children, 9 million are uninsured, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. That’s why Democrats had sought a $50 billion budget increase — a number that’s being negotiated by the Senate Finance Committee.

As Senator Kerry wrote in his OpEd, this is a matter or priorities for our country. The United States is currently spending $10 billion dollars a month on a war of choice in Iraq. This country should be able to make the commitment to funding children’s health care and making sure that millions of the most vulnerable Americans have access to health care services.

This is a matter of priorities, and the current dispute over the S-CHIP bill shows what President Bush’s priorities are — and the priorities of this administration, once again, are not with the citizens of this nation and are not in line with the values that most Americans hold.