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From the Marquette Tribune editorial genius known as the go-to guy for resolving who is or is not an “official f***nut”, Eric Lombardi unleashes a bit of BDS regarding the recent move to expand S-CHIP, a program providing health insurance to children in low-income house households, to the type of rich white kids who populate MU.

I could spend hours looking up facts to refute each of Lombardi’s claims regarding the S-CHIP program, which are peppered with serious concerns that become completely diluted among the more Daily Kos-style rants, but fortunately Elena Wolfe, a recent, May graduate and all-around intelligent gal responds handily to Lombardi here.

Here’s a good chunk of it:

In his Oct. 9 column on the Bush veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, Eric Lombardi expressed concern for the millions of impoverished children in America, stating that the veto ended “the movement to help save the most desperate in America from pain, illness and in some cases, death.” That statement, however, overlooks the the fact that while the intention of the movement may have been to help the needy, in its application, many of the people who would have benefited can’t actually be considered all that desperate.

One look at what the bill entailed revealed serious drawbacks and sound reasons for opposition.

SCHIP was originally created in 1997 to give health care coverage to children from households with incomes of 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $40,000) or lower. Bush supported its renewal this year and even proposed a 20 percent increase for its funding, but the bill Congress sought to pass proposed a 140 percent increase, requiring 35 billion dollars.

This bill was not merely a renewal, but called for a massive expansion which would have worked to enroll four million children over the next five years, after which, there would be an 80 percent cut in its budget. That proposal was problematic, though, because presumably one of two things would have happened: 1) the program would have to be renewed and increased again, a repeating cycle or 2) having lost much of the funding, the rug would be pulled out from many of the recently enrolled children as their names dropped from the list.

Another major flaw of the bill was its rejection of a requirement that 95 percent of eligible children from families at the 200 percent or lower poverty level be enrolled before children from higher incomes could be covered.

Unlike the original SCHIP, the new one would have extended to families earning as much as $83,000, 400 percent more than the poverty level! That figure is shocking, given the Congressional Budget Office report that found that “77 percent of children between 200 and 300 percent of federal poverty level already have private health insurance.” Had the bill been successful it would have allowed people who were able to afford private health care to instead take advantage of ‘free’ health care by switching to a government-run system, which is hardly just or effective in addressing the original problem.

I’ll post a few play by play responses to Lombardi’s comments below.

In wake of President George W. Bush vetoing a bipartisan bill that would have enhanced child health care in America, the Medical College of Wisconsin hosted a seminar composed of the nation’s leading academics in children’s health, poverty and ethical issues of social justice on Saturday morning.

The all-day seminar, entitled “We All Fall Down: Standing Up for Children in Wisconsin” was attended by more than 200 Marquette students, faculty and Milwaukee community members and addressed issues including poverty, poverty’s effect on health and what we can do about poverty’s negative effects on child health care.

End the role of socialism in society, which crowds out employment opportunities that provide for the vast amount of health coverage throughout the United States and here in Wisconsin, and from which government hurts in order to provide for its chosen clientele (in the case of the expansion of S-CHIP, the middle class).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006 12.3 percent of Americans, or 36 million people, fell below the poverty line and many of these individuals have children who live without sufficient nutrition, substandard housing and health insurance.

Because these families work, they do not qualify for Medicaid, but also don’t earn enough to afford private insurance coverage the government established the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to subsidize health care coverage for more than six million American children.

Lombardi refers to two groups of people here. He first discusses the official rate of poverty in the United States based on mathematical formulas which, as The Heritage Foundation has pointed out, do not reflect a modern definition of what constitutes “poverty” - especially in relation to the condition of poverty across most of the West.

Second, Lombardi claims that “they work.” Well, individuals and families classified as poor both “work” and “do not work.” You can’t make a generalization about all of them, and to do so is disingenuous. In fact, welfare systems today mostly reward people for working by letting them keep their welfare (including health payments through Medicaid) up to a certain point.

In the United States, through S-CHIP, that amount is about 200% of the poverty line. These are the people who most need help with health insurance — not the 200-400% above the poverty line who can and already do afford private insurance.

Democrats in Congress, with extremely significant Republican support, proposed and passed legislation to increase SCHIP’s budget by $35 billion over the next four years, which would allow for an additional four million children to gain health care coverage.

However, Bush’s fourth veto of his eight-year presidency killed the bill thus ending the movement to help save the most desperate in America from pain, illness and, in some cases, death.

What Lombardi and his Democrat friends fail to explain is why the middle class should get (and in fact, need to get after taxes take a chunk of out their income) government paid insurance. The program expansion would not cover the people that the alarmist rhetoric of Lombardi leads the reader to believe: they already get it.

Why would Bush veto the bill? Perhaps because the bill was going to be paid for by increasing the taxes on cigarettes and American tobacco company Phillip Morris is the No. 1 contributor to the Republican Party.

Doesn’t the Tribune have fact-checkers, or perhaps just intelligent people who know how to look up basic facts such as who the major contributors to political parties are? Has Lombardi ever even been to opensecrets.org? Probably not. If he knew how to work Al Gore’s internet, he would find out that Phillip Morris wasn’t even close to being a top contributor in last year’s cycle to the Republican Party.

I would love to spend the remainder of this article discussing how George W. is the spawn of Satan, but the real issue here is what is going to happen to these poverty-stricken children now.

Really intelligent comment, Lombardi. Nice to see it in a classy outlet like the Tribune.

Children in poverty have severely higher susceptibility to infection and dental problems, higher rates of infectious disease and asthma and experience a lower exposure to basic medical care, thus resulting in a higher percentage of easily solved illnesses that become chronic or critical.

Most of us at Marquette do not have children and are not poverty stricken. I mean, we’re all poor enough to truly appreciate the dollar menu at Wendy’s, but none of us are really worried about making rent or starving to death.

And yet, somehow you believe that the government should fund your health care not because you are poor, but explicitly because you are not poor, which if you make 200-400% of the poverty line, you most definitely are not. Again, Lombardi and his fellow Democrats need to explain why the middle class should get health care through the government.

Nonetheless, the child health care policy does pertain to us. It pertains to us because before being students we are human beings, and the ways we as a people care for vulnerable children is a reflection of our character.

It’s “for the children.” I wonder which presidential candidate Lombardi supports …

You may not think so, and even choose to ignore it, but poverty unavoidably affects us all.

Poverty causes business to have less qualified workers, inadequate business and services, America to become less competitive in the global economy and the government to spend more money on programs to support those in poverty instead of building a stronger America.

Poverty is caused by the absence of business, the absence of employment opportunities because, as has happened here in Milwaukee, businesses no longer want to stay and grow when the tax rate destroys incentives to work and build. So they head elsewhere, as so many have.

It causes teachers to spend more time on remedial cases instead of teaching, an increase in crime and thus a decrease in feelings of safety when good Americans are out walking the streets at night and funeral directors to bury children who never should have died in the first place.

Poverty affects us all, and those who it affects most are those who are completely innocent: children.

For the children! Even the middle class!

Even for nuts like Lombardi!

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