OK, here is something else, they want to tie healthcare to smoking. They want to tax cigs to pay for the bill, but if the anti-tobacco programs are successful, where will the money come from in the future?

Well, the anti-smoking campaigns have seen limited success so I'd say the revenue from that won't dry anythime soon.

When it comes right down to it, $5 billion a year isn't a hell of a lot of money for any program these days.

OK let's say the bill makes it, then what happens when the Repubs regain the Congress and they will evewntually?

No idea. Once it becomes law it's difficult to repeal.

But they can do as the Dems are doing now. Bill after bill after bill until they find one that will crap on any advances. They will find away believe me, they will find a way.

Prez will not veto it in front of cameras. He will not have a photo-op.

Well, he should. It's an historic moment for his party.

They are trying to control the impact of the veto. Out of sight out of mind, Americans view on the issues.

Why will the Dems not jump on this, it would make Great campaign stuff.



The four leading Republican presidential candidates have aligned themselves with President Bush’s veto on Wednesday of an expanded health insurance program for children, once again testing the political risk of appearing in lock step with a president who has low approval ratings and some critics of the veto within their party.

It is yet another issue — like the Iraq war, North Korea’s nuclear program and the management of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina — where the Republican contenders are treading delicately as they gauge how to position themselves with an unpopular president on contentious issues. While all four are defending the veto, some in full-throated language, the candidates are at the same time forgoing praise of Mr. Bush’s judgment on the issue or of his leadership in general.


LINK

I hope this issue bites every Republirat in the next election.

When the elction for pres arrives we will be bombarded with moral crap and real issues will soon be forgotten, because we will worry about gays marrying or pray or abortion or........anything but a damn real issue.

Analyst see the SCHIP thing as the first salvo in a much larger healthcare war.


WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 — The debate now raging here over the children’s health insurance program offers a cautionary lesson to Democrats running for president. It shows how hard it will be to persuade many Republicans to sign on to their vision of universal coverage.

If Democrats and Republicans had so much difficulty agreeing on a plan to cover 10 million children, most of them from low-income families, how can they ever agree on legislation to guarantee insurance for 250 million or 300 million people?


LINK

The debate now raging here over the children’s health insurance program offers a cautionary lesson to Democrats running for president. It shows how hard it will be to persuade many Republicans to sign on to their vision of universal coverage.

That's only if they manage to hold on to seats they now have. I don't see them with a majority or even the presidency in 2008.

That is their biggest concern right now. I think they will make a good show of it--on my blog I posted some blog results on what you are talking about.

I really hope the next pres will reading these reports before he/she makes some lame ass position public.


More evidence that the U.S. health-care system is far from stellar: It seems that even white, middle-class, well-insured children get poor quality health care more often than not. A large study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that American children receive recommended health-care procedures only 46% of the time when they see a doctor. In fact, children get even worse care than adults, who receive appropriate care about half the time, according to a similar survey published in 2003.

"Taken together, these studies show that no one, anywhere, is immune from poor quality of care [in the U.S.]," says lead researcher Rita Mangione-Smith of Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.


LINK