please comment on,and rate up-my 124th ltte-on SCHIP

[w8liftinglady]

our letters are rated on "most read" and "most commented"...thanks

http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2008/02/04/opinion/doc47a77460596fa307710416.txt
After reading Senator Cornyn’s touching column about his involvement in SCHIP, I thought it important to balance it with a few facts.

• Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, with 20.2 percent lacking coverage, compared to 11.6 percent nationally.

• More than 80 percent of uninsured children have at least one working parent.

• According to the Texas Department of Insurance, the average cost of private family insurance is $11,000 a year, or $917 a month.

• More than 1 out of every 5 Texas children (21.8 percent) lives in poverty.

• Of the 1.5 million uninsured Texas children, 850,000 are eligible for but not enrolled in CHIP or Children’s Medicaid.

• Due to cuts to CHIP, Texas has lost $900 million in federal matching funds that have been returned to the U.S. Treasury and spent by other states.

• Children without health insurance are 25 percent more likely to miss school because of illnesses, and Texas school districts lose $4 million per day in funding because of absenteeism.

• According to the conservative economist Ray Perryman, for every state dollar removed from CHIP and Medicaid, local taxes must rise 51 cents, private health insurance premiums increase by $1.34 and retail sales decline by almost two dollars.

These are the current state of events under the stewardship of Senators Cornyn and Hutchison. Is this our legacy — a state who turns their backs on its citizens when they are in need? As the economy worsens, these numbers will grow. Our elected officials must consider all of their constituents — young and old, rich and poor. Vote in March for a candidate who will make a change.

[w8liftinglady]

1. A funny coincidence-my friend's column on the same subject-we OWNED the opinion page

http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2008/02/04/opinion/doc47a7749091588205204262.txt

Expanding on John Cornyn
By NATHALIE GUYOL
Published: Monday, February 4, 2008 2:27 PM CST
Sigh. Here we go again with the SCHIP spin. I wrote about spin a little bit ago, if you recall; in brief, spin’s not honest and it’s usually not nice.

Conveniently, the op-ed recently published in this paper by John Cornyn, U.S. Senator from Texas, entitled “Expanding health coverage for children,” will serve nicely to illustrate how spin is used to fool us.

He may look like someone’s favorite uncle, but John Cornyn does not bring presents to the children of Texas.

He said in his op-ed that “Children’s health is an important issue to many Texans.” Despite its title, however, a careful reading of the article did not reveal any expansion of health coverage for children; instead, so far as I could tell, it contained at least half-a-dozen justifications for the recent two vetoes by President Bush of legislation that actually would have expanded health coverage for children.

Please excuse me for being picky, but I noticed that Senator Cornyn didn’t include himself in the “many Texans” who consider children’s health an important issue.

Anyhow, in case your eyes glazed over when you tried to make sense of his article, or in case you thought you got his point, I want to do just a little parsing here.

First, Cornyn asserts that we need to “remove barriers that have increased the ranks of the uninsured,” but nowhere in the article does he describe what those barriers might be.

He wrote, “Medicaid already covers families at or below the poverty line.” That would be families of four trying to get by on $21,000 a year or less.

Well, not only is it well nigh impossible to find a doctor in Ellis County who will accept Medicaid patients, because the payments are so low the doctors actually lose money (just call around and ask, if you don’t believe me), there’s a good question whether, after food and shelter costs, there would be any cash left to buy gasoline to drive to a Dallas doctor – unless of course the family were living out of the car anyway.

Cornyn seems unhappy at the prospect that some states might increase the eligibility level to $63,000 for a family of four, or even, “in the north and east” – horrors, to $84,000.

Let me just say this about that: In New York City, where we’ll all agree there are a lot of people living, some of them poor, a bargain one-bedroom apartment is typically $1,000 per month.

Leaving that kind of information out of his argument is, in my book, spin.

Saying that “the federal government already pays approximately half of all medical costs in the U.S.,” Cornyn argues that “This expansion would have increased that percentage.”

Doesn’t that impliedly huge share of “all medical costs” include Medicare, Medicaid, and VA programs? How about the coverage for members of Congress?

SPIN: He wants you to think that adding 4 million more children to the SCHIP program would flat-out break our bank so you’ll agree with him and the President that we just can’t afford it. But he doesn’t really tell us the cost or how much it would have increased that percentage, does he?

Do we know if the increase would have been .0001 percent or 10 percent? Guess he didn’t think it would be helpful to tell us.

Saying “some believe the federal government should pay for all medical procedures” (a choice of words I find puzzling), he claims that expanding SCHIP would have “moved us in that direction.”

Better we should let the uninsured have their medical “procedures” taken care of in the emergency room, I guess, where insured patients and local taxpayers can foot the bill.

In defending the President’s refusal to expand SCHIP, the good senator claims that Congress “cannot pay for those we’ve already authorized.” Anyone know what he’s talking about here? The war in Iraq? No Child Left Behind? The rebuilding of New Orleans? Someone help me out here.

Here’s one of my favorites: A “major increase on tobacco products” would have “fallen heavily on lower-income citizens.” Take that, you poor folks! Only people who make a decent living have the sense to quit smoking or chewing!

Senator Cornyn sees what’s coming down the pike. NOW he says he wants health care reform, “to preserve the positive parts of the private U.S. health care system.” That would be keeping the insurance companies in charge, folks. And what I hear is that he wants as many people as possible to buy private health insurance.

Of course, SCHIP uses insurance to provide health care to poor children (and the families pay part of the premiums), but looks like that doesn’t count.

Cornyn says he wants people to be able “to choose their own doctor and be in charge of their medical decisions.” A cute way of implying that we don’t have those features now, of course. Under Medicare and Medicaid – and for that matter, a single payer plan – both doctors and decisions are the patient’s choice!

See? There’s more than one way to spin a cat!

In his eagerness to persuade us that he really wants to reform our health care system, Cornyn conflates single-payer, government-run and “socialized medicine” systems, mainly so he can use the “socialized medicine” shibboleth to win the reader’s opposition.

FINAL SPIN AROUND THE TRACK: “In the meantime, we have stopped a plan – at least for 15 months – that would have taken millions in Texas taxpayer money and shipped it to other states with SCHIP programs that have lost their focus on providing health coverage for low-income kids. That’s why the little-noticed extension deserves more attention.”

Hard to know where to begin. Clearly, Senator Cornyn wants you to be glad that President Bush vetoed an expanded SCHIP program – one of the few truly bipartisan bills to come out of this Congress, and one supported by 83 percent of Americans — that would have added just under 4 million children to the plan.