SCHIP for Class President! He LIKES you!

The breaking-news headline on CNN right now reads "The House of Representatives passes a more modest expansion of the popular children's SCHIP health insurance program."

I have two problems with this headline.

The first, and more trivial problem, is the use of the word "popular," like SCHIP's the captain of the football team. Throwing that in there is nothing more than editorializing. It is a blatant suggestion by the editors about how they believe their readers to feel about the program. A quick Google News search shows that many other news sources also want to be friends with that popular SCHIP, too.

The second and more substantive problem, though, is that this version is not more modest. It still allows able-bodied adults into the program. It still expands SCHIP into covering middle-class kids. It fails to insist that poor kids be covered before the middle-class kids. It raises taxes in the wake of record federal government revenues. It incentivizes states to enroll more kids in order to get bonus federal dollars.

Rather than offer a bill that provides beneficial coverage for poorer children, the Democrats have once again offered a bill that will lead middle-class families down the garden path of government dependence. Given the choice between "free" health care from the government and health care they have to pay for themselves, people of sound economic judgement are going to take the former. And it's free, so of course it's going to be popular, and since it's popular, we'll just expand it a bit more, so that people making $100,000 or even $200,000 can opt in.

Well, at that point you've got almost everyone, so you might as well make it universal. Everyone has free health care! Hooray! I mean, sure, there are fewer doctors because the money's not what it use to be, and sure the drug companies are folding up and doing less research because there's no profit to be made in that, so we're curing fewer things, but at least he drugs we do have are free. Taxes sure have gone up and the only hospital still open isn't quite as clean anymore.

But that's ok, right? Because it's free health care for everyone.