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September 26, 2007

Special Report Panel: SCHIP, Burma

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. DICK DURBIN, SENATE MAJORITY WHIP, (D) ILLINOIS: $200 billion for helping the people of Iraq the president believes we can afford. But he argues we cannot afford $6 billion for more health insurance for America's children.

SEN. JUDD GREGG, (R) NEW HAMPSHIRE: The goal here is to radically extend the size of a public insurance program to families who are doing quite well, families making up to $80,000.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Some thoughts on this issue now from Fred Barnes, Executive Editor for The Weekly Standard, Morton Kondracke, Executive Editor for Roll Call, and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fox News contributors all.

The program is called SCHIP, which is an acronym which stands for States Children's Health Insurance Program. It is a program the Bush administration says it supports and is willing to fund it for more money than it funded last year.

Democrats want to fund it at a somewhat higher level, which would allow the program to be expanded. So what is really at stake here, Mort?

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: This "$80,000" business is a canard.

HUME: What is the "$80,000 business"?

KONDRACKE: What Senator Gregg and the other Republicans are saying is that Democrats want to provide government funded health insurance to people up to $80,000 per year.

HUME: In income--because this was originally supposed to be for poor children.

KONDRACKE: For poor children, yes, so that is their argument.

In fact 91 percent of all the kids who get this program now are under 200 percent of poverty, which is $40,000 a year, roughly, the people for whom it was intended--91 percent. There are 9 percent of the kids who are above that, and there are states that have opted for 300 percent of poverty, and so on.

HUME: What does that mean?

KONDRACKE: Well, 300 percent of poverty--the poverty level is about $20,000 a year, so three times that would be 60. But it is a minority of states. There is one state in the country that gets up to 350 percent of poverty, which is about $75,000 a year, and one state that wants to go to 400 percent--

HUME: So what is the deal?

KONDRACKE: The Republicans have gone crazy on this. They were proud of the fact that they decided to spend $450 billion over a 10 year period to provide a prescription drug benefits for seniors, but $35 billion is too much to protect poor kids? Their priorities are all askew. They think that this is an ideological tirade.

HUME: The bill will be vetoed. There are enough votes, apparently, to sustain the veto. The Democrats are convinced it is a political loser for the Republicans, the veto and the votes to sustain it--Fred?

FRED BARNES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, WEEKLY STANDARD: Sure it is.

Look, what Mort ignores is that this Democratic bill is simply bad policy at any price.

HUME: And why is that?

BARNES: Why not deal with what the problem is, and that is poor kids, those at 200 percent of poverty or less--$41,000 and change, or less. Those are poor people. But many of those children are not covered. Bush proposed $5 million to cover those who had not been covered by SCHIP.

And then you look at states--and here's the other thing the Bush administration has tried to do, which Mort hasn't mentioned, neither the Democrats, who do want to cover people well into the middle class, and that is to get states to go out and cover the poor kids.

In New Jersey, something like 120,000 kids who are eligible for it right now are not covered by this--

HUME: Why?

BARNES: Because the state has not gotten them. It has not signed them up. But they have signed up a lot of adults.

HUME: Adults?

BARNES: Adults. About 43 percent, I think, of the SCHIP money that goes to New Jersey pays for adults. There majority of the people under SCHIP in Minnesota are adults.

Now, it's waivers that were granted by the Bush administration that allows this, but Democrats ought to be in favor of ending the waivers, ending the subsidy for kids who already have private health care, and focus on the poor kids. This bill does not do this.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Rob Emmanuel and the Democrats are very smart. This is going to kill the Republican's politically next year. The Democrats are going to run ads showing a mother and a sick kid, and it will not matter what the merits of this case are, they will run an ad like the one that ran on behalf of the Democratic congressmen in Texas in 2004. And he won an election in a district that was a dicey one.

Now, what the Republicans will do, they are going to run an ad with a lecture on federalism about how working people in Louisiana should not be subsidizing an SCHIP program in New Jersey which does subsidize families up to $70,000 per year.

Or, they are going to run a chart from a study which has shown that when you increase the program the way that the Democrats are proposing, more than half of the new children enrolled are going to be in families that already have health insurance, so that, in fact, it is substituting people who are in private plans and putting them under a government mandate.

I think the president is right on the merits of this, but on the politics--he tries to argue that Republicans were hurt in the last election because of the perception in the base that they had not restrained spending, and that is true.

But restraining it on this issue, where the tag line is going to be "Suffer the children," is going to be bad politics.

HUME: What about the politics?

KONDRACKE: The politics are terrible for the Republicans.

Why do people, the conservatives like Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah support this plan if it is such a dastardly kind of expensive program?

And, furthermore, the administration charges this is the road to socialized medicine and government. Why would America's health insurance plans, the insurance lobby, be in favor of it? The AMA is in favor of it, they are all in favor of it. Those are opponents of socialized medicine.

HUME: Charles and Mort agree--

BARNES: I don't think the politics are that bad.

HUME: You are saying they are not bad?

BARNES: They take the cynical view that somebody can go before the public, as Mort does here on this show, and say "They are doing it for the children"--

KONDRACKE: They are doing it for the children.

BARNES: Just for the children, the poor children.

KONDRACKE: Yes.

HUME: If it is just for the children, how are all these adults getting covered?

KONDRACKE: There are--pregnant women will be covered under this plan.

BARNES: Mort, face it, you know hundreds of thousands of adults are covered right now by this program.

HUME: Are they all pregnant?

KONDRACKE: Wait a minute, under the Senate bill, there is a discouragement in the funding of the bill for people over 300 percent of poverty. They are not going to be reimbursing the states--

HUME: OK, the vote on this panel is political loser for Republicans-- two, possible winner for Republicans, one.

When we come back those deadly protests in Burma as Buddhist monks clash with security forces. The issue is a democracy.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA BUSH, FIRST LADY OF THE U.S.: We've had sanctions on Burma for many years. They've been put on Burma from other administrations as well. The fact is, though, China is their huge trading partner. Part of their border is the Chinese border. The Chinese prop up the military regime by buying oil and gas. Burma is a very rich country with natural resources.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: First Lady Laura Bush has become a spokesperson on the issue of trying to get Burma to lay off the protesters and allow a little bit of democracy in a country that has been ruled for many years not by a military junta.

Back with our panel. So what about this issue? Suddenly it is front and center, put there, I guess you would say by a combination of the demonstrations with all those monks participating in them, of which we have seen pictures in recent days, and also by what the president said at the U.N. yesterday and now the First Lady today. What about this?

BARNES: It leads nowhere.

What did the U.N. do today? They said "Be restrained in Burma with these protesters." And they begged for Burma to let the U.N. representative come in and talk to them.

I do not know what our sanctions are, but how can you have meaningful sanctions against a country with which you have practically no economic relationship?

HUME: That's because you already have sanctions against them.

BARNES: Yes. You can't and do it. We could have great sanctions against Canada, but it is really hard to have them against Burma. And China is the problem. But what is the U.S. going to do about China?

HUME: Because China is the big trading partner.

BARNES: Sure, and China props them up. China opposed any stronger action by the U.N. today, and will continue to do that. Burma is a tiny satellite.

Now, are we willing to crack down on China? What would be the ultimate sanction against China if we were so mad about what is going on in Burma? That would be to say "We will not allow our Olympic teams to go to China in 2008 for the Olympic Games."

There is not a Chinaman's chance that that is going to happen.

KRAUTHAMMER: Everyone here has good intentions, but no one is serious. What we're getting out of the west is words and empty resolutions at the United Nations.

At least the west is offering do-gooder words. What is happening to the neighbors in Asia is you are not even getting that. You are getting nothing out of the Southeast Asians.

Mrs. Bush indicated that Chinese are supporting the junta with arms and money because the junta allows China to exploit the national resources.

India has said almost nothing. Singapore issued a statement calling for restraint on both sides. On one side--

HUME: Yes, those monks better restrain themselves.

KRAUTHAMMER: On one side you have soldiers with loaded rifles, on the other you have the monk's carrying twigs--small twigs, I might note, not a very good for combat. And the world is watching.

Unless we're prepared to send a carrier offshore, nothing is going to happen. It all hinges on whether the junta has the will to do what it did 90 years ago and massacre thousands of people in the streets.

Remember, the Chinese Communists did that in Tiananmen, and 20 years later, there are going to be the hosts of the Olympics and the toast of the world.

KONDRACKE: I agree with everything that both Charles and Fred have said.

HUME: I am glad you guys are trying to patch things up from the last segment.

KONDRACKE: It is very sad. The Chinese were helpful in the case of North Korea because their interests were involved, because if the North Koreans had a nuclear bomb and it was obvious to everybody, then the Japanese might have one, and the South Koreans might have one, and the Taiwanese might one, and that would impinge on the China's interests.

In this case and the case of human rights, the Chinese care not one wit. They do not have human rights for their own people. They trade with the Sudan, regardless of Darfur. They trade in Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

They don't give a damn about human rights, and it is pretty sad. And we are not going to do anything about it.

BARNES: The world opinion does not bother, even if it is bad, doesn't bother military juntas. It may bother dictators like Ahmadinejad in Iran, but the junta doesn't care.

HUME: That's it for the panel, but stay tuned to find out more about how Hillary Clinton laughed her way across the Sunday shows. That's next.

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