Casual
Casual No Man-child Left Behind Like many a good research-monkey in Washington last week, I found myself combing through the fine points of the State Children's Health Insurance Program bill....
...The White House press office didn't know...
...Somebody's taxes have to pay for S-chip...
...That bill had died in the House...
...But what if it's not, and the bill covers 21-year-olds, I asked...
...Nancy Pelosi's spokesman, Nade-am Elshami, didn't give me any names, and he even insisted the age cap was 18 and always had been...
...Reading the proposed law online, I learned it would not only extend insurance coverage to families making 300 percent of the poverty level, it would also define a "child" as anyone 25 years of age or younger...
...He didn't reply...
...Twenty-five would not make or break it for me," he said, "but if you went any higher I think it would...
...So I pressed Pelosi's spokesman for an explanation on the record...
...So would raising the cap to 25 be a deal-breaker for him...
...Then again, I don't really know what I'd do with the money I'd save if the government gave me health insurance...
...The bill that Congress actually passed and President Bush vetoed defines a "child" as a person who does not "exceed 21 years of age...
...But I felt justified when I remembered that, as a year-long Collegiate Network "fellow" at The Weekly Standard, rather than a normal, if lowly, staff member, I'm stuck shelling out $45 a month for catastrophic health insurance, while all my colleagues suckle at the teat of News Corp.'s health care plan—a plan that, unlike the insurance I conservatively choose to buy, is effectively subsidized with a federal tax break...
...As I returned to pointing and clicking my way through the S-chip bill, I realized I had been reading the original S-chip bill sponsored by Representative John Dingell...
...With Rangel unsupportive and Davis tepid at best about insuring man-children, I decided I would have to resign myself to the status quo: scrimping to buy my own insurance and budgeting for the possibility of unexpected medical costs...
...Getting in line for the government dole might make me a conservative hypocrite, complicit in nationalizing health care and raising taxes on smokers, who will pay for S-chip's expansion through a new 61 cent tax on every pack of cigarettes...
...Having exceeded 21 back in January, I'd missed the cut after all...
...Later, off the record, a Democratic Senate staffer gave me a plausible explanation for how the language, despite its apparent meaning, could actually leave the age cap at 18...
...Alas, my dream of becoming a welfare-king was short-lived...
...I would expect that it's an age commonly referred to as a child...
...This proved a bewildering quest...
...He wrote in an email that the bill's language defining a child as someone younger than 22 "deals with Medicaid, not S-CHIP...
...I asked if he would object to setting the age cap at 25, and Rangel told me: "It doesn't sound like a children's bill at 25...
...Ticked off, I couldn't understand why elite congressmen had callously abandoned millions of middle-class twenty-somethings like me—hardworking Americans who know what it feels like to go to bed sober many nights...
...When he got back to me, I asked him whether he knew what the age cap was...
...Granted, my annual out-of-pocket health care expenditures usually equal the price of a big bottle of NyQuil plus a pack of bendy straws...
...Davis conceded, "That's not unreasonable...
...For a fleeting moment, I was worried...
...I called Democratic congressman Charlie Rangel, the sponsor of the S-chip bill Bush vetoed...
...But that's no guarantee...
...So, I set out to discover who on Capitol Hill had robbed me of three years of congressionally mandated childhood...
...I guess I could take up smoking...
...He hardly seemed an advocate for big kids like me...
...No, I don't," he said...
...John McCormack...
...Congressman Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia who supports the bill, said in a phone interview: "I can't tell you exactly, but I think it's under 18...
...Republicans were just as hazy about the age cap...
...I did a little math in my head and—cha-ching!—realized I too could qualify for insurance under S-chip, as a single 22-year-old man (oops, I mean child) making less than $30,630, which is three times the poverty level for an individual...
...I replied that the relevant section of the bill repeatedly refers to Medicaid and S-chip...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 6
