No Controlling National Interest
Correspondence No Controlling National Interest After a long lead-in, William Kristol and Robert Kagan say that there are profound national interests at stake in Kosovo (“The National...
...Further (again according to the U.S...
...The costs for those visits are covered by insured Americans, through higher premiums and out-of-pocket charges...
...It is a European problem best handled by Europeans...
...Surely there’s more to determining national interest than the “question” offered by the editors...
...The families that have enrolled their children in CHIP and have received eyeglasses, hearing aides, well-baby visits, prescriptions, and other medical services would most certainly tell Goldberg, the Congress, and the American taxpayers that their children are better off with the program than without it...
...If you add uninsured children through age 18, the number grows by more than 500,000...
...And according to William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Hitler himself said, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner...
...Properly speaking, the much praised activities of Forstmann and Walton have as little to do with school choice as when wealthy families send their own children to private school...
...Would the kind of world we want in strategically vital parts include China...
...But this isn’t the first time he has made such a bizarre claim...
...Rick Bucciarelli American Academy of Pediatrics Washington, DC Wagner’s Reich Cycle In defending his musical icon, Michael Linton painted a dangerously erroneous picture of 19th-century composer and polemicist Richard Wagner (“Tone-Deaf,” April 19...
...Congress could not have been clearer when it drafted CHIP and explicitly stated it was not creating an entitlement program for individuals...
...Goldberg says that outreach efforts to enroll uninsured children in CHIP are politically motivated by a vice president anxious to tout a presidential run...
...Bureau of the Census...
...Should we initiate bombing there to snuff out that country’s barbarity toward some of its citizens...
...Meanwhile, fewer and fewer of us would draw Social Security checks, Uncle Sam could cut payroll taxes, and the seemingly everlooming crisis would disappear...
...As to whether there was a per se national interest to begin with, they get fuzzy in offering the “question of the kind of world we want . . . in strategically vital parts...
...Linton does admit Wagner was a racist, but with a quick sleight of hand tells us so were Liszt, Darwin, and most “liberal” scientific thinkers in the 19th century...
...According to statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics, 11 million children in the United States are uninsured...
...He has been against the Vaccines for Children program for years, despite its having helped this nation reach the highest immunization levels for youngsters in the history of the nation...
...His problem, however, is that he is consistently wrong...
...Health insurance offers children regular care, and Kidcare provides that opportunity for several million children...
...That way more and more of us would invest, the economy would grow, and tax revenues eventually would expand...
...The honorable and morally serious part of the impetus behind the schoolchoice movement comes from a perception, in many ways justified, that many inner-city schools are failing the children who attend them...
...Should the same thing be done at the state level...
...Scott Schafer Falls Church, VA...
...What he fails to mention is that many of those services are provided in hospital emergency rooms...
...We should get out of this mess now before it is too late and body bags start piling up...
...Assuming 80 million or so children in the relevant age group, that would be about $40 billion a year in addition to current educational spending...
...Goldberg says “there never was a real children’s health crisis, just a political benefit from talking about one...
...Oh, and away would go one of the Democrats’ favorite cudgels for beating on Republicans...
...Of course, to deny there is a crisis Goldberg has to deny the facts on the number of uninsured children there are in America...
...Do they favor closing the nation’s public schools and having the federal government give every family a $5,000 voucher for every child they have between the ages of 3 and 18 to be spent at the school of their choice...
...There is absolutely no concrete evidence to smear Linton’s other examples with the same brush...
...This figure is based on information from the U.S...
...Marian Wright Edelman President and Founder Children’s Defense Fund Washington, DC Robert Goldberg’s view of how children are faring in the nation’s health-care system is misguided and misinformed, especially when it comes to uninsured youth and the value of the Kidcare program...
...This, however, doesn’t even begin to approach the truth...
...In fact, what Congress entitles is states—to funding under the program—with no entitlement to coverage for any of America’s uninsured children...
...John Breaux’s ideas for improving IRAs as reported by Stephen Moore (“Compounding the Solution,” April 19...
...Peter Connolly Washington, DC Compound Answers Hooray for Dan Quayle and Sen...
...Goldberg would also have us believe that insuring children won’t make them healthier...
...Now he again makes the same contention...
...The fact is that the Congress, the governors, the state legislatures, and the American public believe not only that there is a crisis, but that CHIP is a meaningful solution to the crisis, and are working tirelessly to implement it for the benefit of America’s children...
...Nearly two years ago Goldberg said there was no children’s health insurance crisis...
...Nobody questions their right to spend their own money to fund scholarships, although liberals may question the ultimate effect of their activities on beleaguered public schools and the millions of children who will probably remain in them...
...involvement in the Balkans’ latest civil war absolutely amazes me...
...His charge that Wagner’s racial views have become a lucrative cottage industry for a number of academics ignores both history and the firsthand testimony of Holocaust survivors, who bore witness to the influence of Wagner’s anti-Semitic polemics and operas on leaders of the Third Reich...
...They are more likely to be sick as newborns, less likely to be immunized as preschoolers, and less likely to receive medical treatment for injuries and illnesses such as asthma, ear infections, and tooth decay...
...In 1995 the U.S...
...Wagner was a racist who, in his writings from 1850 to 1882, called for the death of Jews...
...Eugene Blum Baltimore, MD Choosing Carefully THE SCRAPBOOK should desist briefly from liberal bashing to specify exactly what it means by school choice, and exactly how much it wants (“The School-Choice Juggernaut,” April 26...
...Finally, Goldberg claims that 97 percent of children in low-income families are able to obtain health-care services...
...Anticipating being on the losing side of the argument, Goldberg simply decided that “when it comes to children, it seems all politicians are liberals...
...The political problem arises with taxpayer-funded support for private schools...
...Goldberg mistakenly asserts that uninsured children are healthier...
...With increased immunization rates we are also enjoying reduced incidence of immunizationpreventable diseases...
...It would simply make more sense to offer children preventive care at much less expense...
...Goldberg attacks CHIP as an entitlement and would have any unwitting reader believe that it is an entitlement for every eligible child similar to the guarantees senior citizens enjoy through Social Security or Medicare...
...William M. Weiss Flushing, OH William Kristol and Robert Kagan’s strident support for further U.S...
...We have absolutely no business being in Serbia or Kosovo...
...It is a program that deserves public support for its ability to provide the services children need, when they need them, at a lower cost to us all...
...Bureau of the Census estimated that 10 million children ages 0-17 were uninsured throughout the year...
...In fact, last year’s study by the National Research Council determined that uninsured children have many unmet health needs...
...This is the very testimony we should be seeking out for a more comprehensive understanding of the rise of Nazism and the origins of the Holocaust in a nation that only half a century earlier had granted full equality to the Jews...
...Nancy Johnson...
...Bureau of the Census), data for the period between 1993 and 1995 show that as many as 23 million children went without health insurance coverage for at least one month and at least 15 million of those children went without health insurance for six months or more...
...Even Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s personal philosopher and the Nazi party’s chief propagandist after Goebbels, named Wagner one of the four fountainheads of Nazi ideology...
...Tellingly, they start with NATO credibility...
...Correspondence No Controlling National Interest After a long lead-in, William Kristol and Robert Kagan say that there are profound national interests at stake in Kosovo (“The National Interest,” April 26...
...Or should the public schools be left in place and the vouchers still handed out...
...That is specific enough, but it is clearly a derivative concern emanating from the fact that engagement has already begun...
...Three million of these children can benefit from the Kidcare program...
...Leaving aside the issue of whether or not vouchers are constitutional, what do conservatives want...
...This bloodbath has two villains: Milosevic and Clinton...
...James R. Breese Rochester, NY Caring for Kids Robert Goldberg certainly deserves credit for being consistent (“Wag the Kids,” April 5/April 12...
...Clinton certainly does not have the moral authority to preach to anyone about right and wrong, much less lead a “holy” crusade...
...But how about this idea: Collect no taxes on money deposited into and, at the appropriate time, withdrawn from whatever “retirement accounts” people choose, as long as they agree to forgo Social Security benefits...
...The fact is, most of the governors in the 48 states that have adopted CHIPs (30 of them are Republican—some with national aspirations of their own to tout) are engaged in or are preparing CHIP outreach campaigns to insure children...
...Isn’t it a better approach to emphasize charter schools and other approaches (including spending money to equalize urban facilities with those in suburban jurisdictions and demanding greater accountability from teachers) which do not raise the divisive controversies vouchers will inevitably cause...
...But how can a taxpayer-funded school-voucher program be designed to serve only children from a few localities who are almost entirely of one race...
...The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which gives grants to states to make health insurance affordable for children in working families, was passed with considerable leadership by Republicans like Senators Orrin Hatch and John Chafee and Rep...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 32
