George W. Bush is Really, Really Bad, Part 362

President Bush has done so many things wrong, it is hard to believe that he is still able to come up with a steady stream of new, crummy ideas. Yet, he has done it again—this time on an issue that is the centerpiece of my campaign for Lt. Governor, the welfare of Delaware’s children.

Yesterday, the Bush administration imposed new regulatory burdens on states that participate in the CHIP program—the federal/state health insurance program that covers children whose parents earn just enough money to lose Medicaid eligibility, but not enough to buy health insurance. The new burdens will effectively make it impossible for families that earn more than 200% of the federal poverty level to get coverage for their children in the CHIP program—so, for example, a single mother with two kids who works full time but makes between $32,000 and $40,000 a year at a job with no health insurance will not be able to get coverage for her kids. I won’t go into the details—the New York Times article is here. But the result of the new policy is that many children across America will lose health insurance coverage. No families currently on the CHIP program in Delaware would be affected, but one of my priorities as Lieutenant Governor is to expand the CHIP program to enroll uninsured kids with families at higher income levels (an idea already proposed in the General Assembly by Representative Terry Schooley). Under the Bush plan, unless it is changed by Congress or a new President, this part of my plan to cover Delaware kids would be forbidden, and it would become that much more difficult to ensure that Delaware children have health insurance.

The morals of the story are:
1. President Bush is an astonishingly bad president who keeps getting worse.
2. We need our Congressional delegation to pass a federal CHIP bill that properly funds the CHIP program and allows states like Delaware the flexibility to cover more uninsured kids.
3. We need to elect a Democratic president in 2008.
4. And, of course, we need to elect me as Delaware’s next Lieutenant Governor, so we can make coverage of all kids a priority.