SCHIP II - April Fools

It is with deep sadness and a delicious sense of irony, that I wish all of you Happy SCHIP II today. For it is today that this legislation begins to take effect. For those of you who decry the evils of smoking and claim the beneficence of knowing that more "children" will now have available health care, I wish you all happiness of the occasion. Of course there are a few dirty little secrets in the gift that you receive today that you might want to consider as it goes into effect:

• Under the new guidelines, families earning up to $70,000 per year for a family of four will be eligible for SCHIP coverage
• Under the new guidelines people will still be considered children when they are 30, and therefore likewise eligible.
• 60 percent of those currently uninsured are under 35, and 40 percent of them are under 25.
• Many of these without coverage are uninsured not by compulsion but by choice, choosing to spend their money on things other than health insurance and believing that their youth and current good health offer them some level of protection.

But what the heck, you have what you really want now, don't you? Those of us smoking tobacco products will see the single largest increase in taxes on that product in the country's history. Taxes on cigarettes will double, and those on cigars will go up by about 1000%. Therefore those of us with this filthy little habit will be punished on an unprecedented scale. 

While you're enjoying our misery however, you should recognize a few other things. The tax increase put forward will not solve the problem of child health care nor will it fully fund the program that it's supposed to support. That probably means that we are only seeing the beginning of massive increases on tobacco taxes to help make up the coming shortfall, but that's OK too as only the evil will be punished. 

As those burdened with this increasingly punitive taxation finally bow to your politically correct will on the evils of smoking and quit however, the funding problem will not only remain, but will get worse. Eventually the law of diminishing returns will take over and the burden for this travesty of legislation will be placed on the general revenue budget (you know, like Social Security is about to be). 

By then however, this will have simply become one more step down the path to National Health Care in this country that this program was always intended to become, and we can look forward to the shortages of doctors, medicine, and medical technology that has plagued (pun intended) this program in other countries like Britain and Canada. Welcome to the world that you have created, and oh yeah ... April Fools.