Bush, Congress clash over health bill

WASHINGTON — The president wants to reauthorize a federal children's health insurance program, but Congress is making it difficult by attempting to expand and change it in the process, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Wednesday.

A House panel will take up a version of the reauthorization bill today, aiming to give $50 billion to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. A Senate panel, with the help of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, approved a $35 billion expansion onto the $25 billion base late last week. The House and Senate each would need to pass the bill overall before ironing out differences between the two and sending it to the president.

But the president — through Leavitt, a former Utah governor — has said he will veto the bill.

"We would reauthorize SCHIP tomorrow at $5 billion," Leavitt said in an interview. "We want anyone that is eligible now to be eligible tomorrow, and we would do it in a heartbeat. There is a math problem and then there is an ideology problem. We can solve the math problem. We've got to resolve the ideology problem."

The administration would reauthorized SCHIP at $5 billion above the $25 billion baseline.

Part of the math problem is that the administration and Congress have come to different conclusions in calculating who needs coverage, who would be eligible and how much it would cost to cover those in need.

Leavitt said some in Congress are using the reauthorization legislation to reach a "Medicare for all" goal, which puts the certainty of the coverage children now covered by SCHIP into question.

"That is wrong," Leavitt said. "We believe that every American ought to have access to insurance, and that ought to be the debate. We ought to reauthorize SCHIP, and then we should move on to the bigger discussion on how we create access for every American to an affordable policy."

Leavitt was governor of Utah in 1997 when Congress first passed SCHIP, and he watched its development closely because he was involved with the National Governors Association, he said. He had the same concerns then that he does now. He fears the program would morph into the federal government running health care versus just helping those in need.

He said the administration does not support a huge expansion of the program and does not want to see overall changes to federal government's role in health care tied directly to whether or not SCHIP gets reauthorized before it expires on Sept. 30.

"We're not the ones proposing the change," Leavitt said.