Florida Republicans Make Medicaid & KidCare Suffer

Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist have left KidCare underfunded. Bush lost $20 million in federal funds for KidCare. Bush intentionally let KidCare funding die. The waiting list for children with medical needs was over 700,000. Parents were greeted with the answering machine message: "It is not possible to tell you where your child is on the wait list or how soon he or she will be enrolled."

Barack Obama's stimulus package may not help Florida KidCare. The state is eligible for $33 billion. The problem is Florida has to match $1 billion for every $2 billion in federal funds. In 2007, Kathy Castor urged Crist to call a special session for KidCare. Crist let Senate President Ken Pruitt let KidCare die in session. The Republican Pruitt blamed KidCare not passing on it's supporters.

"The Senate has been vilified about this, and that's okay, " Pruitt said. "But this didn't happen in the Florida Senate. It's just these providers and these groups finally got together to come up with an agreement, which they didn't, and the process we have here gave them ample time to do it."

How has the Republican-led Florida Senate "been vilified?" Does the GOP want to be known as the party that is against child heath care? Michelle Malkin's attacks on Graeme Frost showed utter insensitively. Republicans demonize children, but support CEO pay raises. Talk about fucked-up priorities.

We now learn Florida is not likely to receive funding for Medicaid.

And Crist's budget writers are going to have to deal with some troublesome details.

For example, the bill provides $87 billion nationally for Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for medical care for the sick, elderly and poor. Medicaid enrollment in Florida is up by more than 10 percent.

But to qualify for the money, states are required to maintain the same level of Medicaid coverage that they provided in July.

Cut Medicaid as enrollment increases. That was bound to bite Crist and Republicans in the ass. Republicans did health care on the cheap.

"Most of the things in there require us to spend more money in order to get more money," Amy Baker explain, coordinator of the Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research. "So there are going to be hard decisions to make."

Crist and the Florida legislature may have to increase state funding for Medicaid. Florida is in a fiscal deficit. That solution is unlikely.

Policy people need to understand how Florida got into the current health care crisis. The message should be citizens will not tolerate poor health care policies. Preventive health care saves lives and money. Crist and fellow Republican's may have to borrow money to receive Medicaid and KidCare funds. The money would have to be paid back with interest. Fiscally, Republicans counter productive health care policies cost the taxpayer more. Enough is enough.

SCRIP Is Dead

House Republicans were able to maintain Bush's SCHIP veto. The Democratic bill for SCHIP is dead.

It's over: The House just voted on the SCHIP bill moments ago, and failed to override President Bush's veto.

The vote was 273-156, falling short of the two-thirds vote needed to overturn Bush's veto.

The roll call is here.

SCHIP is designed for children whose parents too much to qualify for Medicare. 6.6 million children received SCRIP coverage in 2006. Which is what made the Graeme Frost attacks so misleading.

This is how damaging the Bush veto is.

Keeping the program at current levels would require expanding funding by about $13.4 billion over five years, for total funding of $38.4 billion between 2008 to 2012, according to a CBO report in May. Part of the reason is rising medical costs. President Bush has proposed a $5 billion expansion, for total program funding of $30 billion over the next five years. He has said he might be willing to go higher. The bill Bush vetoed would increase funding by $35 billion over the five years, for a program total of $60 billion. Ultimately, it would cover 10 million people.

The budget increase wasn't huge liberal expansion. Healthcare costs have rapidly increased. The Democratic bill is $3 million less than what is needed to maintain SCHIP. Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) said powerful words about the Republican hypocrisy on spending.

"Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement."

Republicans seized on the opportunity to pounce on Stark.

The National Republican Congressional Committee issued this release in response to Stark's comment today: "Pete Stark and the Democrat leadership owe the American people an apology, the troops and their families an apology, and they should apologize to the millions of children being held political hostage by their party’s desperate attempt to score a political victory instead of providing healthcare for those who need it most."

Stark's home state will be gravely affected by Congress's failure to override the veto. The California Primary Care Association issued a statement.

"California’s Healthy Families program could run out of money next year and be forced to disenroll hundreds of thousands of children," said Carmela Castellano-Garcia, president and CEO of CPCA.

The Harvard School of Public Health, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and National Public Radio conducted a surcey and found two out of three Americans are against Bush's veto.

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that 77 percent of voters favor reauthorizing at a $39 million price tag. This was political suicide for Republicans. That didn't stop Congressional GOP members from following Bush off the cliff.

Howard Kurtz on Graeme Frost Controversy

I'm glad Josh Marshall reads those boring Washington Post chat transcripts so I don't have to. Howard Kurtz shows his compassionate conservatism for Graeme Frost. Short answer: the wingnut bloggers did nothing wrong going after the teen. Even though their facts were wrong.

Rockville Md.: I have a question that has been bugging me for some time and I hope you can address it. I have folloewd the recent stories about Graeme Frost, the child who gave the Democratic response about SCHIP, and what some commentators are calling the "Swift Boating" of Frost by right-wing groups. Realizing that the jury may still be out about Frost: It is one thing when politicians slam each other, but when someone goes after a private citizen, don't libel and slander laws ever come into play?

Howard Kurtz: Libel and slander laws only come into play when you say something that is both inaccurate and damaging about someone. Whether or not the Frost family should be considered too well-off to qualify for federal health benefits doesn't seem to fall in that category. When the parents agreed to make their son available to the Democratic Party as a spokesman for the program, surely they must have expected that their financial situation would become part of the debate. I am not, for the record, in favor of beating up on 12-year-old boys, but the family did willingly step into the political arena.

Kurtz does the Glenn Reynolds-style defense of the Right and then adds the disclaimer on the end.

The Intellectual Vacancy of A-List Conservative Bloggers

Jonathan Cohn has a must-read post of the conservative blogosphere's bogus reporting on the Graeme Frost noncontroversy. He is a 12-year-old whom was hospitalized because of brain trauma from a car accident. He did the radio response to President Bush's veto of SCHIP. The conservative blogosphere decided to shoot the messanger. Creating Swiftboat-level doubt is a specialty of theirs.

Power Line

A Freeper took the trouble to investigate the 12-year-old who gave the Democrats' weekly radio address last week, and whose family ostensibly is too poor to pay for medical insurance, and therefore wants to use your money instead. The results are hilarious. Mark Steyn has more here.

Instapundit

Question: If business owners with half-million-dollar-plus homes and kids in expensive private schools now count as "working families," does this mean they'll get tax cuts?

Mark Steyn at The Corner

"icwhatudo" at Free Republic, however, showed rather more curiosity than the professional reporter paid to investigate the story and did a bit of Googling. Mr Frost, the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families":

All this started because of an anonymous Free Republic commenter. John Hinderaker and Glenn Reynolds can at least pass off there factually-challenged posts by saying they're bloggers. Steyn is suppose to pretend he's a journalist.

The Frost are below middle income. They aren't living by Sudan standards, but aren't rolling in money. Neither parent can get private health coverage. The father is a woodworker and welder and mother works part-time. Graeme and his sister have been hospitalized. That scares off healthcare companies. Even the healthy looking Michelle Malkin is having trouble getting health coverage. That hasn't stopped her from crucifying the Frost family on her blog.

I often read attacks like this and wonder what is the motivation of these right-wig bloggers. They end up looking like fools. They attack a child and a popular government healthcare program. If these people were running for office they would be more marginized than Alan Keyes. One week it's attacks on Amanda Marcotte (like these people haven't written inflammatory punditry) and the next it's blaming the Washington Post for the Terri Schiavo memo Mel Martinez was passing around.

This isn't citizen media. It's Ann Coulter clones so angry at the Democratic Party all sense of reason leaves them. They could have argued against SCHIP on merits. They chose to go after a car accident victim and his family. These people never thought of how bad the Frost attack would hurt their side because they never gave serious consideration to the millions that would be cut from SCHIP by Bush's veto. It's bumper sticker slogans of "socialized medicine." Never is consideration given to the compassionate thing to do is provide healthcare. I dare any conservative blogger, with network news camera present, to turn people away from emergency rooms because they don't have health coverage. This would be seen beyond the wingnutsphere and low-rated cable news shows. Malkin backed away from accuing John Kerry of giving himself a self-inflicted wound. Conservative bloggers are scared when they are outside of their self-made bubble.



Bloggers such as Reynolds, Hinderaker and Malkin are the new stars of conservatism. The movement is in serious trouble. Intellectually-honest bloggers such as Dan Drezner and Ross Douthat should be conservative stars. The latter has is own ideological differences with SCHIP. Douthat does admit, "I will say that demonizing them is a lot worse than dumb..." The question is why are the dumbist voices the biggest stars in the conservative blogosphere?