My Side

(Congressman John E. Peterson, a Republican, represents the 5th Congressional District of Pennsylvania in the U.S. House of Representatives.)

A decade ago, Congress passed a measure to help provide health care for children whose family's income was too high to qualify for Medicaid. Here we are in 2007 and the debate in Washington is missing the target of helping underprivileged kids gain health care coverage.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is a worthy program. However, the current proposal drastically veers from SCHIP's original intent of helping lowincome children, expanding the program to cover individuals never intended to receive subsidized health care, including childless adults.

There are 1.7 million eligible children who are not currently enrolled in SCHIP. Conversely, hundreds of thousands of adults are enrolled. This bill wrongly removes an important measure requiring 95 percent of eligible children to be enrolled in SCHIP before expanding coverage to middle-income families.

Why would we expand coverage to middle-income folks while there are still so many needy children not enrolled in a program created to cover them?

What may be worse than this reckless expansion is that 2 million children will drop their private coverage and move onto SCHIP. Shouldn't we help more low-income kids gain coverage before subsidizing health care for those who already have it?

The bill even makes it easier for illegal immigrants to receive SCHIP benefits. In 2005, Congress passed citizenship verification requirements for those applying for Medicaid and SCHIP. The current SCHIP bill repeals that provision and allows applicants to verify citizenship by simply submitting a social security number.

My constituents and Americans everywhere, who struggle to provide health insurance for their own families, work too hard to have their tax dollars used to cover the health care tabs of individuals who broke our laws and came here illegally.

Further, to fund this huge government expansion of health care, the bill raises cigarette taxes from 39 cents per pack to $1.00 per pack. This tax increase will disproportionately impact my district's poorest residents who shouldn't have to subsidize health care for middle income families and illegal immigrants.

Instead of playing politics with needy children, Congress should agree on a reasonable SCHIP reauthorization that truly helps low-income children gain access to quality health care, doesn't benefit illegal aliens and doesn't raise taxes on America's poorest.