BUSH: SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN

PRESIDENT Bush kept his promise yesterday to veto the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill that would expand health- care coverage for more families.

It's only the fourth veto of his presidency . . . and we know how (very) long that's been.

Bush was in Lancaster, Pa., yesterday, discussing his reasoning for the veto. It's not clear from his remarks that he actually understands how SCHIP works . . . or, more likely, how poverty works.

For example, in explaining his support for government health coverage for poor children, he talked about Medicaid and SCHIP as if they were interchangeable. They're not: Medicaid is indeed for poor families. SCHIP is for those families whose incomes are too high for them to qualify for Medicaid, and may be still too low to afford private health insurance.

What kind of income does that mean? In Pennsylvania, a family of four making up to $41,000 a year represents 200 percent above the poverty level; their children can be enrolled in SCHIP and receive health insurance for free.

Other families with higher incomes, above 200 percent and up to 300 percent, may be eligible for SCHIP, but they pay for their coverage. This ranges from $38 to $150 per child per month.

Those higher-income families are what's at issue in the veto. Congress worked for months to craft a bill to expand coverage to families up to 300 percent of poverty, a move that Pennsylvania has been successfully pushing for a while.

Bush doesn't think those families should get help paying for health insurance; he keeps saying that families earning $83,000 could be eligible, and too many could opt out of private insurance. (That $83,000 figure would be for a family of six.)

Bush says he believes in private insurance. He maintains that he doesn't want socialized or federalized medicine.

He may be the last person left in the world that is happy with how well private insurance works. Besides, SCHIP is private insurance, and it isn't socialized medicine, since families pay for it.

Besides, "socialized medicine" is less scary to us than having great medical care but shutting many families out of access to it. And many countries that do have socialized medicine - Canada and Great Britain, for example - do far better than ours does in neonatal and prenatal care.

Congress will have to fight hard to override Bush's veto. But this is well worth fighting for.

(Families who may be eligible for SCHIP should call 1-800-986-KIDS). *