So President Bush vetoed the SCHIP bill today. The bill would have expanded a federal government program providing health insurance for children. The President tried to explain why he made his veto in a speech today: "The intent of the program was to focus on poorer children, not adults or families earning up to $83,000 a year. It is estimated that if this program were to become law, one out of every three person(s) that would subscribe to the new expanded SCHIP would leave private insurance. The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children."
President Bush is on firm, principled ground when he emphasizes that this is about keeping people in private insurance, and out of government-run insurance programs (though he needs to do a lot more frequent explaining of why that's important).
But these kind of vetoes also get him in trouble. He says he's not necessarily against all federalized, governmental insurance programs for kids. He just wants those programs geared to poor kids. In other words, governmental involvement is OK. Bush just wants to argue about how much. There's really no principled difference there, then--and so I think many Americans wind up saying that if you're going to go part of the way, why not throw in more money and have the government insure more children? Why argue so much over money details?
It's where moderate Republicanism runs into big trouble. Many voters say--why go Democrat lite? If some are willing to go part way, why not go the whole way?
