RUSH: The president has followed through on his promise and vetoed that ‘children’s health care bill,’ the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, known here as the ‘bullSCHIP’ program. He vetoed it today as promised. The AP referred to it as ‘a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded the health care insurance for the children.’ You know, this is a true stealth plan to institute the whole concept of socialized medicine throughout society. If you go back to ’93 and you look at Hillary’s health care plan back then, one of the strategies was: Do everything ‘for the children’ because nobody’s going to vote against children. Nobody is going to oppose the children. Nobody is suggesting the program be cut! The program is ten years old. That’s something I think a lot of people don’t understand about this is, we’re just up for renewal, and what the Democrats want to do is include all kinds of people who in no way meet the definition of poor or children. And the president said, ‘Nope, we’re going to expand the program to handle those who are poor, but we’re not going to go any further. We’re not going to waste taxpayers’ dollars.’ Now, he knows what’s going on. So, on cue, the Democrats took to the floor of the House this morning during one-minute speeches. We have the reliable Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Allyson Schwartz (D-PA), William Lacy Clay (D-MO) all crying about Bush’s veto.
DeFAZIO: He’s going to cast the first veto of his presidency! [sic] His target, ten million low-income kids.
EMANUEL: Nearly one million soldiers will create a very long line in America’s emergency rooms. The emergency rooms are President Bush’s answer to America’s health care crisis.
SCHWARTZ: The president’s veto makes it clear that health care for America’s children simply is not his priority.
CLAY: President Bush just vetoed this bipartisan legislation. The president’s opposition to this bill puts him squarely in the minority.
RUSH: Well, then override it! They’ve got override protection in the Senate, but they don’t in the House. So what’s going to happen here is they’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a bill that the president will sign. There will be an expansion of the program; it will cover poor children. It’s just not going to cover kids up to the age of 25. It’s not going to cover incomes up to $82,000. Well, the states can do this if they want to. I think ten or 11 states have, and the Democrats are going to go out there and try to pressure 15 Republicans to change their votes in order to get a veto-proof majority on this and they’re going to lobby them. They’re going to put pressure on them to get them to change their votes. We know how that works. Now, the Democrats and the liberals cannot get me to change my mind. They can’t get me to change or buckle to them, but elected Republicans, sometimes, are a little different, especially when you put ‘children’ in the bill. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens. Now, ‘The Politico notes that a 1993 memo from Hillary Clinton’s health-care task force proposed using children as a mechanism in order to take control of health-care delivery for all Americans.’ The Politico is a website that was started up by a couple of guys who used to work at the Washington Post.
‘Back in 1993, according to an internal White House staff memo, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff saw federal coverage of children as a ‘precursor’ to universal coverage. In a section of the memo titled ‘Kids First,’ Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed. And one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured. That idea sounds a lot like the current [SCHIP], which was eventually created by the Republican Congress in 1997. ‘Under this approach, health care reform is phased in by population, beginning with children,’ the memo says. ‘Kids First is really a precursor to the new system. It is intended to be freestanding and administratively simple, with states given broad flexibility in its design so that it can be easily folded into existing/future program structures.” So this document that The Politico has uncovered tells the world exactly what Mrs. Clinton’s plan is. There are people out there calling the SCHIP expansion and the renewal a Trojan horse. It’s exactly what it is. It is nothing more than a trick. It is a precursor. It’s designed to get this country to a full-fledged, government-run socialized health care system, and the hook is to do it ‘for the children.’ The president vetoed it today. Look, all of this stuff works together, the smear of me. Telling you this and giving you this and giving this wide berth and loud amplification and precisely why me, people like me, are considered dire threats to Mrs. Clinton’s future plans. So it’s all rolled in together to try to keep people from standing in her way, on her way to her coronation.