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Republicans oppose bush on children health care { October 12 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119214598827056667.html?mod=googlenews_wsjhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB119214598827056667.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Child-Health Bill May Define Republicans
Party Is Torn Between Placating Base
And Need to Win Independent Voters
By DAVID ROGERS
October 12, 2007; Page A6
WASHINGTON -- Heading into next week's veto showdown over children's health insurance, Republicans are in a pickle as they try to balance placating their conservative base against the need to win back independent voters in 2008.
The health-care bill is fast becoming a proxy for a larger discussion -- which has sparked intramural bickering -- about how the party wants to present itself to voters. Democrats have faltered in polls measuring Congress's performance, but to take advantage of this opening, many Republicans think their party must reach beyond its base and offer positive policy options to be seen as a real alternative.
"The reason we lost the last elections wasn't because our party didn't show up," said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. "We got 91% of the Republican votes for Congress. We lost independents by 17%. That's where we have to go."
Secure in tailored districts, however, and leaning to the right, House Republicans are betting they can weather labor-financed television ads opposing the veto and still successfully support the president's position. The goal is to force Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) into negotiations to scale back the proposed $35 billion five-year expansion of the state-federal Child Health Insurance Program.
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But Republican senators, who must appeal to a greater number of statewide, low-income constituents, are finding it hard to ignore independent voters who fled the party in 2006 and distrust Republicans on health care. Eighteen Republican senators, from all corners of the U.S., backed the original CHIP bill. If just half the House Republicans from the same 15 state delegations joined their Senate colleagues, Mr. Bush's veto could be overridden in both chambers.
Popularly known as CHIP, the state-federal program grew out of welfare reform in the 1990s and is intended to help cover working-class children whose households aren't eligible for Medicaid. Republicans were among its creators under President Clinton, but as the program has expanded, there has been increased concern about the costs and impact on private insurers.
The splits in state delegations are striking. In Missouri, for example, Republican Sen. Kit Bond, a former governor, backed the bill while House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, the father of the current governor, opposed it.
"Senators just read the title of the bill and wanted to vote for 'children,'" said Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas) with sarcasm.
Mr. Barton said the bill is too costly, but Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) counters: "There are 98 House members who voted against CHIP and voted for a much more costly Medicare prescription drug bill in 2003 ... This at least makes an attempt to pay for itself."
The White House is confident it will prevail. But a win for the president doesn't erase the long-term challenge for Republicans to unify around a coherent message on health care, an issue on which Democrats -- especially the party's presidential candidates -- have taken the lead.
By 57% to 31%, a majority of voters expressed more confidence in Democrats than Republicans on handling health-care and drug issues, according to a survey of 1,000 registered voters from David Winston, a Republican strategist and adviser to House Republican Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio). Among independents, the gap was wider: 63% to 19%. The numbers shifted when Mr. Winston tested the idea that Republicans will support CHIP but want to "put poor kids first" rather than expand coverage to adults, illegal immigrants and those already with insurance. Independents favored that message 47%-38%.
"The key is to define what you are for," said Mr. Winston.
The timing of the fight is frustrating, especially for House Republicans. The stage had been set for a veto battle not over health care but over Democratic appropriations bills that add $22 billion in domestic spending to the president's budget. Mr. Boehner hoped to unite conservatives and independents by attacking Democratic "pork-barrel spending."
By contrast, CHIP evokes images of children, and the labor television ads use this to try to make opponents seem heartless. Ms. Pelosi held up a chart yesterday -- at a time when Congress is being asked for more money for Iraq -- showing CHIP's annual cost is equivalent to maintaining U.S. forces in the war for 40 days.
Republicans now believe the White House put them in a hole by not providing more money for CHIP in the president's budget in February. The administration promised an increase then of $5 billion over five years. Even conservative alternatives now are almost three times higher.
"There's nobody reasonable arguing that the president went far enough," said Rep. Steven LaTourette (R., Ohio).
The CHIP debate has produced angry exchanges between Republicans over the administration's portrayal of the Democratic bill. Conservative opponents of the bill are irked by a landmark proposal by New York state to extend CHIP to families earning 400% of the poverty level, or about $83,000 a year for a family of four. The White House has said it would be powerless to stop such a move because the bill narrows the administration's authority to bar such expansions on the grounds that they are "crowding out" private insurance carriers.
The fact that New York is home to Sen. Hillary Clinton, a leading presidential contender, also makes the example useful for the White House. "The folks in my district don't want to be paying for somebody in New York for health-care subsidies for their kids when they're making $83,000 or whatever it is that she put in there. It's outrageous," said Rep. Sam Graves (R., Mo.).
Senate Republican supporters of the bill argue that the $83,000 family is a fiction based on a narrow reading of the executive's powers to set income limits for CHIP participants. "That's baloney," said Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, "The administration has very clear authority...Either the president doesn't understand the legislation or whoever is telling him this ought to be fired. This stuff makes me mad, and I think I have a right to be mad."
A second concern involves the enrollment of pregnant women and adult parents in CHIP, a practice that the White House blessed in the past but now criticizes as health-care costs for adults have increased.
The bill now would effectively force childless adults off the rolls in two years and make it harder for states to afford continued coverage of parents by reducing the share of federal aid. The administration argues that it is already cutting the number of covered adults under CHIP administratively by shifting them to Medicaid and that the bill threatens to slow this progress.
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