On the spot for children's health

THE US SENATE is debating expansion of the federal/state health insurance program for children, but there is no doubt it will pass easily this week. The only question is whether it will gain enough Republican votes to override a veto promised by President Bush. The four Republican senators from New England will play an important role. All of them should support this program for families with incomes too high to qualify Medicaid because it has improved the lives of children in New Hampshire and Maine, the states they represent.

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the two senators from Maine, are already on board. Snowe, supported by Collins, proposed a more extensive expansion of the program even than the bipartisan leadership of the Finance Committee ultimately devised.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-Chip) already provides insurance to 14,500 children in Maine, and the compromise would allow several thousand more to gain the benefits of comprehensive health insurance. "The number of uninsured kids in Maine has fallen by 50 percent [since 1998]," Jen Burita, Collins's communications director, said yesterday.

This success is replicated around the country, prompting the Finance Committee to propose a measured $35 billion expansion over five years that will allow 3.2 million children to join the 6.6 million already enrolled. Bush has been attacking this proposal as a slippery slope to "federalized medicine," and New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg opposes it as well, echoing Bush's critique and adding an assertion that the expansion is underfunded. John Sununu of New Hampshire likes the concept of expansion, but hasn't said how he will vote on the bill.

We on this page have been advocating major expansions of federal health insurance programs for the past two decades. If it were up to us, we would cover everyone in the country. The Senate bill is merely an attempt to fill a crack in the system caused in part by the deterioration of employer-based health insurance, and unlike most policy initiatives of the Bush administration, it would be funded by a new source of revenue -- a 61-cent a pack increase in the federal cigarette tax. Bush and Gregg have nothing to fear from the growth of S-Chip.

A report by the Carsey Institute of the University of New Hampshire, released this spring, confirms the importance of S-Chip there, even though employer-based coverage is more extensive than in most other states. S-Chip directly covers more than 7,000 youngsters and is an essential part of the Healthy Kids initiative, which has helped insure all but 6 percent of New Hampshire's young people.

Sununu is up for reelection next year. New Hampshire voters will be able to assess whether he, like Collins and Snowe, has put the needs of his state's young people over the dictates of his party's leader.