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| Issue Spotlight |
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| Friday, September 28, 2007 |
SCHIP expansion: One step closer to socialized health care |
by Congressman Steve King |
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Judging by the $431 billion in tax increases Washington liberals have attempted to put into law since they took the majority last November, one might guess that President Lyndon Baines Johnson is back in charge. It's been 40 years since LBJ welfare, and more than 8 trillion taxpayer dollars have been spent on failed government-run programs.
With that in mind, it might surprise you that our own Iowa governor applauded a Tuesday vote in Congress to increase your taxes again to pay for another LBJ-style program. This time it's the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), or Hawk-I in Iowa, which raises taxes, gives benefits to illegals, and is a net loss of funding compared to Iowa's current SCHIP funding.
Originally, Hawk-I was designed with the best of intentions: for children of families at 200 percent of poverty, who did not already have health insurance. But the SCHIP expansion passed Tuesday night is not only a chip off the old, socialized-medicine block, it's the first building block of Hillary Clinton's national, government-run health-care plan. This is what President Bill Clinton said about achieving socialized health care on Dec. 3, 2000: "You know, when Hillary and HHS Secretary Donna Shalala and I started working on this back in 1993, we proposed a solution that would have covered all Americans ... And it was too much for the system to accommodate at once, so we've gone back, piece by piece, trying to achieve that. We have now the Children's Health Insurance ... Next, we need to deal with the 55- to 65-year-old age group."
Socialized health care, or any type of government-run health care, has failed everywhere it has been tried. In fact, Germany, Great Britain, Canada and other countries are desperately trying to privatize their socialized health-care systems. Canadian companies have sprung up to facilitate Canadians' travel to the United States for life-saving treatments. So why would America head into the fire others are fleeing?
As you might expect from something that is a stepping stone for Hillary Clinton's total socialized health care, SCHIP is designed for public-relations appeal and to extend political patronage, not for effectiveness. In fact, the proposed new expansion of SCHIP would draw in at least 2 million children of families who already have private health insurance. That's going backward and contradictory to our experience.
Even households earning more than $80,000 would be eligible for money from this SCHIP expansion that is supposedly for poor children. The whole thing would be purchased with increased tobacco taxes, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can count on only if 22.4 million more Americans start smoking over the next 10 years. And if all of this weren't absurd enough, the SCHIP expansion would make it easier for illegal immigrants to get taxpayer-funded health care by watering down current requirements to verify citizenship.
Gov. Chet Culver and Lt. Gov. Patty Judge wrote me recently requesting a "yes" vote on this new LBJ-style SCHIP. The bill, however, would result in a net loss of $226 million over five years for Iowa, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Families USA. That's hardly a bargain for Iowa children and taxpayers.
I voted against this welfare expansion, and will vote to sustain a presidential veto. Bad policy may be good politics for LBJ, the Clintons and their acolytes like Culver, but not for the American taxpayer and not for those children this bill is supposedly designed to help.
STEVE KING, a Republican from Kiron, represents Iowa's 5th District.
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Thursday, August 26, 2010
King: Vilsack makes false claims to push amnesty
Congressman King, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration, challenges Agriculture Secretary’s Remarks on Amnesty
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Monday, August 23, 2010
King Urges Iowa Medical Board to Halt
Congressman King: “The dispensation of RU-486 via telemedicine violates Iowa law and FDA protocols.”
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