In the New York Times (here via AlterNet), Paul Krugman takes the President out to the woodshed for opposing broader health care coverage for children and applies a well-deserved verbal lashing:
When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.
Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That’s why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.
But President Bush says that access to care is no problem — “After all, you just go to an emergency room” — and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he’s declared that he’ll veto any Schip expansion on “philosophical” grounds.
It must be about philosophy, because it surely isn’t about cost. One of the plans Mr. Bush opposes, the one approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Senate Finance Committee, would cost less over the next five years than we’ll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.
The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage — a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.
Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children’s health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.
So what kind of philosophy says that it’s O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children? [full text]
Kmareka.com 
I hear your concerns, Eddie, but the sad reality is that the problem of uninsured children is not simply a product of parents having kids “they cannot afford to provide for.” It is much more due to the faulty economics of our government’s policies and practicies, which have permitted growing income inequality, wage stagnation (except for CEOs), outsourcing of jobs, unchecked medical costs (and thus insurance costs), etc. Many of the parents who have children for whom they cannot provide health insurance are working, sometimes more than one job. But their government has backed them into an economic corner in which insurance is either not available—e.g., because their employer(s) will not give them enough hours to qualify—or not affordable. Thus, it is not the parents who are being irresponsible but our government. Let’s affix blame where it is rightly deserved.
Eddie, I am a little older than you, 52, and also thinking about my retirement. I want this generation of children to get the best start we can give them, because when I’m ancient, I don’t want to have to live behind locked doors because the children grew up sick, poorly educated and unprotected–and are now the adults I’m afraid of. We’re all in it together. And don’t think running to the burbs is the answer. Some of the most isolated and underserved elders I see now are trapped in the burbs unable to drive.