A Plot Foiled?

NRO runs an editorial today on the HillaryCare Trojan horse known as SCHIP running down its laundry list of statist outrages and demanding a Bush veto.

To summarize:

***Its cigarette tax hike funding mechanism is a self-undermining fraud.

***Prosperity will encourage states to spend through the roof on it, while times of recession will encourage them to shift the tab to the feds.

***Rich "blue" states will be the undeserving recipients of a huge income transfer from "red" states.

***It creates a "poverty trap" by tying health insurance coverage to lower incomes, generating a disincentive to "get ahead" (i.e. SCHIP's constituency "insurance").

***It will cost many kids in families at the upper end of the income range to lose their coverage and be herded onto the dole against their will.

Did I mention this is the prelude to HillaryCare? As it turns out, that comes from a memo from the Jokeress herself:

Back in 1993, according to an internal White House staff memo, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff saw federal coverage of children as a “precursor” to universal coverage. In a section of the memo titled “Kids First,” Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed.

And one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured.

That idea sounds a lot like the current State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was eventually created by the Republican Congress in 1997.

“Under this approach, health care reform is phased in by population, beginning with children,” the memo says. “Kids First is really a precursor to the new system. It is intended to be freestanding and administratively simple, with states given broad flexibility in its design so that it can be easily folded into existing/future program structures.” [emphasis added]

So what's the lesson? First, that Hillary and her party never gave up on the idea of socialized medicine after going for it all at once went down in flames thirteen years ago. Second, that compromising with Democrats on ANYTHING is a terrible idea unless it drags them towards our agenda.

And third, that the President had better veto this pathetic capitulation so hard the stamp goes clear through his desk, or bid hail & fairwell to affordable health care, a huge dollop of constitutional liberties, long-term American prosperity, and the like political survival of his party.