Bush concerned Americans would move from private insurance to government healthcare through SCHIP

[KansDem]

Children's Health Insurance Faces Touchy Debate
by Julie Rovner

Morning Edition, July 17, 2007 · The Senate is set to move on a bill to renew the program that provides health insurance to more than 6 million children. Children in working-class families earning too much to qualify for Medicaid are covered. But lately the program has gotten caught up in the broader politics of health reform.

--more--
NPR

Listen to Bush explain how this program will encourage Americans to move from "private sector" insurance to government healthcare. He sounds really incredulous that Americans would want to do this. You think so, George? Now, why do you suppose Americans want to move from private insurance to government healthcare?

[MichiganVote]

1. Well Congress and he seem to like "gov't" insurance.

[SharonAnn]

2. We had this in a Letter to the Editor today from Region IV, U.S. Health and Human Services

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/17/letters/

This is an abomination!

Baloney! If we have money to kill adults and children, we surely have the money to provide healthcare to our children. And why is it that they think "Most of the children Congress wants to add to SCHIP already have private insurance."? Is "most" defined as 51%?

Ike had the quote for this:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953"

[dajoki]

3. Here's why he doesn't want people to switch...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3378138

comment | posted July 12, 2007 (web only)
Healthcare vs. the Profit Principle
Barbara Ehrenreich
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/ehrenreich

It's always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as "43"--and now perhaps better named "29" for his record-breaking low approval rating--is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children, and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private healthcare vs. government-provided healthcare. Speaking in Cleveland recently, Bush boldly asserted:
I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt ... to federalize medicine....In my judgment that would be--it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.

<<snip>>

But Dr. Reddy--who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor--has a principled reason for his piratical practices. "Patients," the Los Angeles Times reports him as saying, "may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford." He dismisses as "an entitlement mentality" the idea that everyone should be getting the same high-quality healthcare. This is Bush's vaunted principle of "private medicine" at its nastiest: You don't get what you need, only what you can pay for.