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.