More on Children's Health Care

Over at Children First for Oregon, Cathy Kaufmann liveblogged yesterday's session on children's health care. It's not only a good outline of the debate, but pretty entertaining.  The posts start with this one; here's Cathy's summary of Rep. Richardson's argument:

Now Rep. Richardson is speaking about the Cs - crowd-out, capacity issues, and costs. (There is a 4th C I just missed—I wish it were children’s health.) He seems to believe that children will be enrolled in the health plan in a head-hunter sort of a fashion.  I’m also hearing him make the crowd-out argument - greedy families will flood the system for free health care, too many children will want dental appointments than we have dentists. Here’s the 4th C—it’s charity. He seems outraged now that $24,000 for a family of four is considered poverty and further distribed that the poverty line will move up to $24,500 next year. Seriously, I mean—what are these families doing with all their money? Probably throwing it away on things like rent and food. The argument he makes now is that tobacco tax revenue will one day go away, so we can’t fund something as important as children’s health care with it. Far better to just not fund children’s health care at all. This makes sense. In bizarro world. Government should not have to help working families—this is the “C is for charity” part of the argument. Paying for health insurance is the responsibility of families. Government is here to help.....tobacco companies?

The posts begin here and continue here and here.  Go have a look.

[Note: text updated to correct a typo--the "not," italicized above.]

April 27, 2007 Posted in elsewhere.