What is going on in the Assembly Republican caucus?  Have they lost their minds?  The Senate passed the Healthy Families bill, a bill with a tax increase in it, with Republican help, which was foolish enough.  One Senator said he just couldn’t see "children losing their health care."  He couldn’t have articulated the Democrat argument for any tax increase better.  But the Assembly caucus voted overwhelmingly for the thing.  Are they nuts?

I will start with one observation.  I was one of 5 Senators who voted against the Healthy Families bill in 1997.  Healthy Families is the California version of the so-called State Child Health Insurance program (S-CHIP) which was passed by the national government (with a Republican majority in Congress) in those days.  The reason given for passage at the time was that the federal government had to do something about the uninsured children out there.  So-they passed a program where the federal government paid for two-thirds of a subsidized health insurance program (with the state picking up the other one-third) for the so-called working poor, those poor workers whose employers were too cheap to buy health insurance.

Interestingly enough, after 10 years of being in effect, it was clear that the money being spent on the program was having absolutely no effect.  In studies done year after year, academicians and policy wonks everywhere couldn’t understand how 10 per cent of the workforce could be uninsured before S-CHIP, and 10 per cent was still uninsured year after year, despite the growing roles of government insured workers.  What was happening?

It turned out employers were figuring out how to transfer their health insurance costs onto the government.  They would simply drop the coverage of the employees, and the employees would sign up on the government supplied health insurance (do the words "public option" come to mind?).  The number of uninsured throughout this entire time stayed relatively stable.  All that happened was that the government spent huge amounts of money on a government program that failed to fulfill its mandate (that was a big surprise), shifting billions of dollars of costs that used to be picked up by the private sector to the government.

So, in the last week, Republicans were faced with the opportunity to actually shrink the size of both the federal and state government at the same time, by eliminating a program of very marginal value, and they punted.  They walked around like their Democrat colleagues talking about how they were helping "the children," voted to increase taxes on insurance companies, and bragged about their bipartisan behavior.  I was aghast.

I wasn’t there.  I don’t know what they were told, but I was the Vice Chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, and the Republican representative on the HHS budget subcommittee for years.  I know what a boondoggle Healthy Families was (and is).  It’s only justification at the state level is that the federal government is spending most of the money.  Let’s do taxpayers everywhere a favor.  Let’s actually kill a program whose benefits do not justify its costs.  S-CHIP, like thousands of federal programs, has failed to satisfy its reason for existence.  It should be allowed to die a quick and justified death, no matter how much the federal government is spending on it.

And if smart policy decisions are not enough reason to kill the bill, perhaps keeping your word to the voters of your district ought to move your conscience a little.  You promised you wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone.  You just violated the promise, and what is worse, you violated that promise for a program that doesn’t do what it promised to do.  (oh, and by the way, replacing a federal tax that is going to expire, with a state tax, is still a tax increase, even if the state tax is lower than the federal tax.)  That is why these promises are made.  You may not always know the facts about a particular program, but you know right from wrong.  It is right to keep your word, no matter how good the reason for breaking it may sound, or how small the damage from breaking it may be.  Keep your word, and you can never do wrong, no matter what the thousands of analysts say.  They were wrong, and they led you astray, but you were wrong to break your word.  There is always a good excuse for bigger government, and you just fell for one of the biggest Democrat lies of all, that you were doing this "for the children."  You were doing it for bigger government, and more government intrusion into the private markets, nothing more, nothing less.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.