Because the states were doing such a good job with it before SCHIP?
If the Feds and the states were fighting to see who could be first to insure uninsured children, I’d have no objection to letting the states have first crack; I’m no Federal absolutist. But they weren’t.
What we have here is a Federal-state partnership: both pony up some of the money, the Feds make some of the rules, but the states actually administer it.
Seems to work pretty well. Can’t see a reason to undo that over some states’-rights purity principle.
It hasn’t been established that smoking creates a negative externality. The studies I keep being refered to seem dishonest in the extreme, counting only the costs of health care for smokers without considering the offsetting savings to the state when people die young.
It’s a dangerous slippery slope you go down when you use externalities to justify restrictions of freedom when those externalities only exist because of a mandatory government program in the first place. I’m fully in agreement that if I voluntarily trade with someone, I should pay for the external costs to 3rd parties of my actions. But if that trade is imposed on me, then also making me pay for the externalities of that trade is not really fair.
For example, let’s say that the government made univeristy education free. Well hey, now that the state is paying for my education, does it not have a right to ensure that students are studying properly? So now maybe we can justify mandatory curfews for college students and forced study times.
If government suddenly went into the auto insurance business, and provided free auto insurance for all, a whole host of new externalities would be created that are now dealt with by sliding rate scales. Would you support a tax on the elderly to make up for their higher accident rates? Banning fast cars? Making the driving age 25, on the grounds that young people have a disproportionate number of accidents and therefore are burdening the rest of society? Mandating that everyone have to go through government driver training programs? Taking away the driver’s licenses of those who have poor driving records?
All of these would correct the new externalities imposed on us by single-payer auto insurance. They’d also significantly reduce our freedoms.
Forcing me into a government program, then making me pay for the ‘externalities’ of my lifestyle because I’m now in a government program, is not correcting any sort of market force. It’s simply restricting my freedom even more to save the government money.
In a private system, health insurers can charge more for smokers. I’m free then to either go uninsured, or to quit smoking, or to pony up the extra money as a consequence of my habit. Nothing wrong with that.
If the government controls health care, I have no choice. If there’s an externality, it’s the government’s problem, not mine.
Read Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. He explains this well. Regulations create more regulations. State control of your private life suddenly gives the state an interest in your private affairs. Now there is rationale to control your behaviour. If the government guarantees your job, suddenly tardiness and absences become criminal offenses. If the government provides you a free home, suddently it has an interest in your maintenance schedules and your cleaning practices. This is a very dangerous road to go down. Public health care is one of the biggest ways in which we wind up ceding much of our freedom to the government for the sake of safety from financial loss.
Yeaaaahhhh. I stand corrected. I didn’t notice how you mentioned tobacco in your OP, and presented the full story. It’s not as if you simply tried to make it out like Bush was against health care for children.
I wouldn’t say that this bill is mainly targeting cigars. Instead, because of poorly written language, it seems that premium cigars may see their taxes go up by around 20,000%.
Not only that, but I can even accept that their ostensible and real purposes differ by light-years. I grew up in the shadow of the Beltway, after all.
Here, friend Scylla has claimed multiple layers of ostensible and real purposes of this bill. On one level, he says, it’s ostensibly about helping children, but its real purpose is to harm the cigar industry. And on the next, it’s only ostensibly about that (“designed to be vetoed”), and its real purpose is to get Bush to veto it so that everyone can scream about what a meanie Bush is.
Yes, but is it because of poorly written language? Sounds like the lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing.
I do hope Bush vetoes this bill. If we, as a society, decide we need to fund more healthcare “for children” then we, as a society, should pay for it just like we pay for most things-- everyone chips in. I absolutely hate these so-called sin taxes or taxes that are targeted at one group of people. An exception I would make is a use tax, like a gasoline tax, which can be a good proxy for road usage.
Whatever gave you the idea that I slavishly support what you claim is the Democrat’s position on this?
You dragged the 300-400% number in, I didn’t. I am speaking of the many who pay like $2000 in income tax. That’s a taxable income of $18300. Counting the standard deduction and exemptions for a family of, say, 4 that comes to about $45000 gross. Do you really think that tax credits equaling maybe $250 to $400 are going to be an incentive for that person to rush out and buy health insurance costing a couple hundred dollars a month?
I’ve been stewing on this for two days now, and it’s becoming obvious that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Families who make up to 200% of the poverty line are eligible for free coverage. Families that make more than that pay for the insurance. They don’t get it for free. At the highest levels, the premiums are $150 per month per child, with co-pays that are roughly in line with private insurance. BTW, the $150 per month per child is what it costs the state. (This is for Pennsylvania; the information is here, and it’s a PDF file.)
The whole point of the CHIP program is to insure children whose parents don’t have access to other coverage. This includes the self-employed those whose group coverage premiums are otherwise unaffordable. If you live in an area where the cost of living is very high, paying even $150 per month per child is a hell of a lot more attractive than paying more than that for group coverage that may still have a high deductible and high co-pays that still keep adequate care out of reach.
I don’t rule out the possibility that smoking might be a net positive from a strictly dollars and cents view. However, I think the reason studies clearly link costs and not positives is, the costs can be clearly linked. The positives can’t. You can’t clearly demonstrate that someone who dies earlier from tobacco related lung cancer ends up costing society less because we have no idea when they would have died otherwise or any idea how many resources they would consume (or how many they would produce.) Some people who smoke don’t get lung cancer, instead they get more chronic conditions such as emphysema which they live with for years and years, sometimes into their 70s and beyond, constantly draining resources and lighting up.
It’s an excise tax on tobacco products, the trade that is creating the externality is the money for tobacco product trade. If you don’t want to engage in that trade, you don’t have to do so, no one forces you to buy tobacco products.
I’ve asserted we have to strive for what is reasonable and what is desirable in addition to what is simply fair (ie associating all negative externality costs with all transactions that create them.)
I don’t think I’d support any of those things, no. None of which are analogous to an excise tax. An excise tax doesn’t remove your freedom to do anything, it just makes you pay more for a given product.
I’ve quite clearly stated in several recent threads I’m no fan of publicly funded health care. I think private health care is a better system. However there is a strong bit of the realist in me and I realize that certain government welfare programs are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and within that future I’d rather people like smokers are paying for them out of their discretionary spending money than workers out of their income or property owners out of their property.
