House Passes Children's Health Bill

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he will make sure Republicans who oppose the bill pay a political price, and that price could keep growing. Van Hollen said Democrats should keep sending the bill to Bush until he signs it.

The measure would make it very difficult for states to cover children at higher than three times the poverty level, or $51,510 for a family of three, analysts said. About 70 percent of the children who retain or gain coverage under the bill would be from families earning less than twice the poverty level, or $34,340 for a family of three, according to Genevieve M. Kenney, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

Throughout the day, both sides lobbed rhetorical strikes, each accusing the other of playing politics with children's health. Republicans attacked the bill on multiple fronts, saying it would move the nation toward "socialized medicine," ease access to Medicaid for illegal immigrants, and lavish "pork-barrel" spending on a few lucky states and districts.

"This is a government-run socialized wolf masquerading in the sheep skin of children's health," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.).

The bill's fine print does raise indigent health-care reimbursements to Tennessee and Hawaii, helps county-operated health facilities in California's Ventura and Merced counties, and boosts Michigan's Medicaid subsidies, a provision inserted by House Energy and Commerce Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.).

But Democrats said that such issues could hardly compete with the central goal of the bill. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, contrasted Bush's opposition to the bill with the hundreds of billions of dollars the administration has sought to fund the war in Iraq.

"It's about the priorities, and the president has told us his priorities," Emanuel said.

Briefly, there was a human face to the issue on Capitol Hill yesterday when Bonnie Frost, a Baltimore woman whose four children ages 9 to 14 have been enrolled in the program for eight years, appeared at a news conference with one of them, Gemma, 9, to support the bill.

When Gemma and her brother Graeme, 12, suffered traumatic brain injuries in a car accident in 2004, SCHIP made it possible for them to get the medical care that they needed, Frost said.