“This vote feels like the movie, ‘Groundhog Day.’ Relying on more Americans to smoke to expand a children’s health insurance program to cover adults, illegal aliens, and people making $80,000 a year makes no sense no matter how many times we vote on it. Insurance portability, preventative medicine, supplements, association health plans for small business, decreasing barriers to entry into the market, price competition, online pricing, transparency of cost, and technology will transform health care for all."
Cannon continued, "Democrats are insisting on pursuing a path of government administered health care. If this approach prevails, Americans should get used to the words 'I'm from the government; I am here to check your temperature.’" Section 211 of H.R. 3963 severely weakens the current law requiring states to document the identity and citizenship status of Medicaid applicants by allowing a verbal presentation of Social Security Number to count as “proof” of U.S. citizenship. In order to pay for 5 years of SCHIP and increased spending in Medicaid, H.R. 3963 will increase tobacco taxes by over $70 billion over the next 10 years. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) calls tobacco taxes “the most regressive of the federal taxes,” meaning that the vast majority of any increases will be on the backs of low-income American families. The tobacco tax scheme in H.R. 3963 is also part of a fiscally irresponsible and deceptive budgeting gimmick that terminates SCHIP funding after five years but has to keep the tobacco tax hike in effect for 10 full years in order to make this proposal appear to be budget neutral on paper. This means that under the financing scheme in H.R. 3963, the SCHIP program will be left without funding or a funding mechanism from FY2013 through FY2017. Unless the Democratic Leadership honestly intends to terminate the SCHIP program during this five-year period of time, they will have to institute another multi-billion-dollar tax increase by 2012 in order to avoid kicking millions of children off of their health insurance coverage. In their official analysis of the H.R. 3963, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that 1.1 million new enrollees will be added to SCHIP as a result of an “expansion of SCHIP and Medicaid eligibility to new populations.” This means that these children live in families whose incomes are too high in order to qualify for the SCHIP program today. H.R. 3963 will also allow New Jersey to receive full SCHIP reimbursements for families with incomes up 350% of the Federal Poverty Level, which is $72,275 for a family of four this year and $84,455 for a family of five. CBO projects that 50% of the 1.1 million new enrollees in the “expansion of SCHIP and Medicaid eligibility to new populations” category already have private health insurance coverage. This means that the taxpayers will simply be paying for the government to buy out the health insurance premiums of these children who already have quality private health insurance coverage instead of focusing on actually enrolling low-income, uninsured kids. According to official CBO projections, there could actually be over 500,000 more adults on SCHIP in 2012 than there are today. There were 700,596 adults enrolled in SCHIP at some point in FY2006, and CBO projects that up to 1,258,000 adults could be enrolled on SCHIP at some point during FY2012.
