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By now, President George Walker Bush may have already vetoed the bill, passed with bi-partisan support in both House and Senate, to fund the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The President says he supports the general concept of assisting needy families with children in getting medical care, but Congressional Democrats have expanded the program to include too many families, including some that could presumably afford private insurance.
Their proposal would move millions of children who
now have private health insurance into government-run
health care,
Bush said.
You can see the political lines being drawn here. Many
Democrats favor some form of government-run health
care,
and expanding the children's program could be
seen as another step in that direction. So a Republican
president who believes in private health care would
logically push back and try to keep the program from
expanding.
However, that logic could be extended to many other federal programs, now used by people of all economic classes. And if that happened, we might see presidential announcements like these:
· President George W. Bush announced yesterday that federal lands, principally those administered by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, will be off-limits to all but subsistence hunters this fall.
Our surveys show that many hunters could easily
afford to go to private game hunting preserves like those
we have in Texas. Allowing them to use public lands to
harvest public game is another step toward
'government-owned hunting areas,' and must be resisted by
all good Americans who believe in free enterprise and
individual initiative,
the President said.
He added that the vast majority of big-game hunters
on public land could well afford to go to the supermarket
and buy beef, mutton and pork,
the President said.
And in these times of budgetary restraint, we shouldn't
be subsidizing them.
However, the President resisted calls to increase the
leasing fees energy companies pay to drill on public lands.
These guys are hurting,
he said, and it's the
duty of a compassionate government to assist them as much
as possible.
· In a move that caught many observers by surprise, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it will no longer seek prison sentences for many white-collar criminals.
When you look at it closely,
a Justice official
explained, speaking on condition of anonymity, these
guys can afford their own food, shelter, clothing and
medical care, even after we've fined them. So why should we
put them up at public expense?
The official said the inspiration came from the White
House after President George W. Bush commuted the jail
sentence of I. Lewis Scooter
Libby following his
convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice. The
President's action saved taxpayers the cost of
incarceration,
the Justice official said, and it got
us to thinking about other ways to save money. We're trying
to minimize the number of people in government-run housing,
especially those who can find other accommodations.
· Many recent measures taken by the Department of
Homeland Security will be scaled back, a White House
spokesman said yesterday, because they're protecting too
many people who can afford to hire their own
protection.
Citing national-security considerations, he declined to
provide many details, but pointed out that there are
thousands of Americans who could afford to hire their own
Blackwater force, and under the old system, they were being
lured into a government-run protection system that involved
communication monitoring, airport screening and the
like.
He added that The original intent of this program was
to further democracy and capitalism world-wide, thereby
eliminating terrorism and fanaticism. It was not to have
Americans looking to their government for help.
· President Bush is expected to announce soon that the federal employee health-care plan for Congress will be terminated in the near future.
As I have often stated,
the President explained,
government-run health care is something we must limit to
those who can't afford anything else. Our representatives
and senators can certainly afford their own private plans,
and they should be setting a good example.
Alas, I suspect we'll never read of such things. The
President, like those senators and representatives who
oppose government-run health-care,
are perfectly
happy to have it for themselves, even if they think we need
to be protected from it.
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