Andy and Oregon Congressman Greg Walden (the only member of the Oregon delegation to vote against the children) are welcome to live in the dark ages or the third world where children die on a regular basis for lack of basic medical care. I would prefer a society that actually cares about protecting life after birth and treats all of God's children as equally deserving of care.

I finally realized what the andy (the trollster) and the GOP really want.. A return to the stone age and caveman family values.

Oh I forgot, they don't think humans evolved either, maybe it's an alien science experiment gone awry. I only want my taxes killing humans, not taking care of them... Give Andy an "F". Thanks, Andy, that'll be another contribution from me to my favorite Dem.

I finally realized what the andy (the trollster) and the GOP really want.. A return to the stone age and caveman family values.

Oh I forgot, they don't think humans evolved either, maybe it's an alien science experiment gone awry. I only want my taxes killing humans, not taking care of them... Give Andy an "F". Thanks, Andy, that'll be another contribution from me to my favorite Dem.

41 days of fighting in Iraq or 10 million for children's health care? Every Congressional representative from Oregon supports SCHIPS program except Greg Walden. Here comes the groaner..Walden sure has a SCHIP on his shoulder.

Andy suggests that since we didn't need health care for kids in 1950, we must not need it now. This is a lie by analogy. The difference, of course, is that kids in the 1950s had access to health care--the government didn't have to pick up the tab because almost everyone could afford to take Wally and the Beav to the family doctor.

What Andy really suggests is that, through the callousness of ignorance, we should take comfort in a decision to cut off sick three-year-olds to spite "tax and spend" liberals.

Sorry, Andy, but even in George Bush's America, that's a loser.

I guess Andy won't be using hydro-electricity or interstate highways or sending his kids to school or calling the fire dept or any of that crap based on evil taxes. Peaople got along fine 100,000 years ago without all that, ya just gotta man up. Lazy kids get bit by a wolf and suddenly it's society's fault he's got rabies! I wonder who paid for Andy-Troll's health care when he was a kid? When I was a kid in L.A. in the 60's my Dad had a union machinist job, raised three kids, owned a nice home, bankrolled Mom's fledgling business and paid his credit cards off each month. The hospitals were not-for-profit, California universities were publicly financed and things were pretty good. Except for the 'Nam thing, it was pretty good.

Oh, and Bush is a kid-hating D-Bag.

Jeff, you are a damn socialist.

It's true!

Actually in 1950 many, many parents had a lot of trouble providing healthcare for their children, and for themselves as well. Harry Truman proposed a national health program. It was defeated on "socialized medicine" arguments pressed most strongly by the AMA at the time. The docs' opinions are a lot more varied now.

Provision of healthcare as a "fringe benefit" of employment became an alternative. Employers liked it because it gave them other things to bargain about besides wages and working conditions. They thought that providing public funding for healthcare, a form of "social wage," would increase union bargaining power and preferred to make workers trade off other potential gains. Although unions had been somewhat weakened by Taft-Hartley and internecine political struggles related to McCarthyism, the huge upsurge in unionization that took place in the 1930s and 1940s was still fresh and the process of raising industrial workers into middle-class income scales was still going on (aided too by the G.I. Bill).

This was the period of peak union density in the U.S. (ca. 34% in 1955) which meant that unions also set the competitive terms for hiring skilled and semi-skilled workers in many non-union workplaces. At about that time relations between organized labor and big business settled into a sort of compromise or truce in which unions became less militant, and companies negotiated increases in wages and benefits as productivity expanded, a situation that lasted until the recession of the early 1970s.

Although there was a growing pattern of northern industry moving south, U.S. manufacturing was still base in country.

Andy's idea that families just provided for their kids without government help is wrong in all kinds of ways. In addition to the fact that unionization was enabled by the Norris-La Guardia Act and the NLRA in the 1930s, most hospitals were either publicly owned or owned by community non-profit agencies. A great deal of basic preventive care (esp. vaccinations) and children's health surveillance were provided either by local government health agencies or school nurses.

And, of course, before the great advances in preventing previously deadly communicable diseases in the mid-20th century, what a lot of families did was watch helplessly as kids died in the tens of thousands of diseases that today kill only dozens nationally.