It's the 21st century, we live in the richest country in the world and we are actually debating whether we should deny children health care because of income.
We're talking about 9 million children across the country who receive health care services through the Children's Health Insurance Program - best known as CHIP.
CHIP was enacted with bipartisan congressional support in 1997 to provide health care coverage for children from eligible families with low and moderate incomes. But any day now, if Congress doesn't act, these kids could lose the health care they depend on.
Paul Krugman, a columnist with the New York Times, calls it "the Republican War on Children," and he poses a pointed question: "Would you be willing to take health care away from a thousand children with the bad luck to have been born into low-income families so that you could give millions of extra dollars to just one wealthy heir?"
That's what's happening. But it began even before the tax cuts.
Congress missed a Sept. 30 deadline to extend funding for CHIP, a popular plan that's been regularly funded by both Republicans and Democrats for 20 years.
Members of both parties say they want to continue the approximately $15 billion-a-year program, but thanks to chaotic and partisan fighting in Washington this year, they can't agree on how to fund it.
The federal funding for the program is distributed to the states, and administered there. In Tennessee, it's known as CoverKids (and a portion of TennCare). In Georgia, it's Peachcare for Kids, and in Alabama it's All Kids.
Now, thanks to a dysfunctional Washington, it's endangered.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, who helped create the program, says the reason CHIP is in trouble "is that we don't have money anymore." Then he voted for tax cuts.
A few days later, Congress passed a hastily agreed-to, two-week spending bill to avert - temporarily at least - a government shutdown after Friday. That will make some money available to some states that already are running out of funds. But a long-term solution remains elusive.
Tennessee is in better shape than most states, according to the Tennessee Justice Center. CHIP funding will not run out here until May, the advocacy group says.
Georgia and Alabama are on schedule to run out of CHIP money sometime between early January and the end of March, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of Medicaid officials in 50 states.
Notably, one part of tax cuts is a giveaway to inheritors of the nation's largest fortunes - like the Trumps.
Under current law, a married couple's estate pays no tax unless it's worth more than $11 million. And no, it isn't a burden on small businesses and family farms. Each year, only about 80 small businesses and farms pay any estate tax at all.
But Republicans think this is still too high a burden for the rich. The Senate tax bill doubles the estate tax exemption for rich kids to $22 million, and the House bill would do away with the estate tax altogether.
That means our government will lose $20 billion in revenue from the estate tax. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said we needed to eliminate estate taxes to reward those who don't spend their money on "booze or women or movies."
In fiscal 2016, the CHIP program cost only $15 billion - a tiny share of the federal budget - and that $15 billion paid for the health care of children from poor and middle-class families who had no insurance or couldn't afford the cost of their employers' family coverage.
These Republicans who voted to help the rich people skate out of taxes but can't find a way to provide children's health care are morally bankrupt.
Our country is not becoming "great again." Our country is regressing.
Twenty years ago our president and Congress were able to surmount ideological divides to agree that children should get insurance coverage without bankrupting parents.
Today, they can only agree to pass a tax bill that will help billionaires and corporations at the expense of children.
We have lost our way.