Bush's threat to veto kids' healthcare

For only the fourth time during his presidency, Bush is threatening to wield his big bad veto powers. This time he intends to smack down a bill designed to grant healthcare insurance to uninsured children of low income families caught in the insurance Catch-22.

They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid - govt provided insurance to the poor - but who don’t earn enough to buy insurance for their kids and probably themselves as things go amidst the American healthcare crisis. Glad to see Bush reserves his power of veto to protect us from those pesky bills posing practical solutions to real problems.

W’s worried things will get out of hand and we might end up with too many kids with the proper healthcare their parents couldn’t otherwise afford. Imagine the horror! Since an increase in the tobacco tax is designated as the source of funding, let’s see if we can work out this problem. Higher tobacco tax raises the price of cigarettes and might encourage people to cut back or quit smoking. Oh but that would hurt profits at the tobacco companies and those are W’s friends so we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to encourage people to quit smoking and improve their health either because then they won’t need as many pharmaceuticals and won’t need to pay those insanely high health insurance premiums and that’ll ruin profits at drug and insurance companies.

No, we can’t risk that so instead let’s risk the health of poor children. I mean, odds are, they’re going to grow up and vote Democrat if they vote at all and what’s the sense in that? We also don’t want to risk looking like Canada or any of those crazy European nations with socialized medicine because that just leads us right down the pathway to communism, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the thinking? I cannot otherwise understand what is so evil about having access to free healthcare like in the UK or Canada especially when you hear all of these stories of Americans forking out big bucks for healthcare insurance and still not being covered or protected from huge medical bills. I’m glad Bush doesn’t want things to get out of hand. We must watch what we spend on health insurance for uninsured American children so we have enough in the coffers to continue dropping bombs on Iraqi children instead. Read the full story from BBC.