Bush vetoes children's health insurance bill

WASHINGTON - President Bush yesterday vetoed a bill to add $35 billion to a program providing health insurance coverage to children from lower-income families, portraying the State Children's Health Insurance Program as a costly entitlement program that has increasingly come to benefit middle-class families.

The veto sets up a clash between the president and Democratic congressional leaders, who have been stymied in recent efforts to stop the president's escalation of the war in Iraq but are more confident about their political standing on an issue they describe as their top domestic priority. They immediately pledged to try to override the veto, but appear to be about 15 votes short of the requisite two-thirds majority in the 435-member House.

The president, who has been pushed from within his party to take a stronger stand on fiscal discipline, said that the expanded program - which was strongly promoted by Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy - would be responsible for "federalizing" healthcare.

"The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children, and the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that's where the philosophical divide comes in," Bush said.

Bush delivered the veto, only his fourth while in office, with little of the pomp the administration puts forward when it takes stands that it sees as politically advantageous. The news came not at a Rose Garden ceremony, but a press release issued while the president was en route to address a business group in Lancaster, Pa.

Many Republicans have complained that they have been poorly served by the president's move, which could hurt GOP candidates in moderate districts.

"I'm not too sure why the president and the Republicans in Congress chose this issue to plant the flag," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster whose firm last week released a poll showing 61 percent of GOP voters support the expansion of the program.

"Republicans have been put in the position where they'll have to walk the plank and vote twice against this program," Fabrizio said, referring to both the initial vote and the attempt to override Bush's veto.

The original SCHIP program, begun in 1997, was designed to cover children from families earning too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance. The bill vetoed yesterday would increase funding for the program, which now costs $25 billion over five years, to $60 billion over the same period, thereby expanding the number of children enrolled in the program from 6.6 million to 10 million.

In the Senate, the measure passed with enough votes to override the president's veto, including those of some conservative Republicans such as Iowa's Charles Grassley and Utah's Orrin Hatch. But in the House, enough Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, voted against the measure to give the president enough votes to uphold the veto.

The White House accused the bill's supporters of attempting to "demagogue" the issue by passing legislation they knew would not become law.

"They made their political point, and what the president said is, look, send me the bill, I will veto it, and then we will get about the business of trying to find some common ground and reach an agreement on a way forward," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Democrats, however, suggested that they would put off compromise while attempting to convert Republicans.

"I'm optimistic that we can prevail," said Representative James McGovern, Democrat of Worcester. "If the president wants a fight, I'm happy to fight with him on this issue. I would bring it up and bring it up until he caves."

Throughout the day, Democrats sounded confident that they were on the winning side of the issue - Kennedy called it "probably the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country" on the floor of the Senate - but some Republicans were nearly as tough on their own leadership.

"I know the president said it's too expensive," said Representative Jo Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican, but "a family making $50,000 a year can't afford an $11,000 insurance policy."

"It's one more strike against a seemingly insensitive, out-of-touch Republican Party," said Representative Wayne Gilchrest, a Maryland Republican who supported the bill and taunted colleagues reluctant to quash a Bush veto. "Do they love the king's courtyard that much, that they can't defy the president?"'

While advocacy groups and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have pledged to hound Republicans who opposed the bill, House Democrats also have to contend with eight of their colleagues, six of them Southerners, who voted against it. Some cited a 61-cent-per-pack increase in the cigarette tax included in the bill, which they said would hurt the people who harvest tobacco and those who consume it.

"It falls really hard on low-income families in Tennessee," said Representative Zach Wamp, a Republican from Tennessee.

Supporters of the bill said they would concentrate on persuading representatives from tobacco states that the bill would not harm their constituents.

"We have to focus not only on urban kids and their lack of healthcare, but also on rural kids," said Representative Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat.

The legislation would raise the income level for families receiving the coverage from the current 200 percent of the poverty line to 250 percent. Several states, primarily in the Northeast, have already raised their levels of coverage. In Massachusetts, more than 90,000 children are enrolled in the program, including families earning up to three times the poverty line. Bush's veto of the bill will have no immediate effect, because Congress has already extended existing funding for the program.

Alice Dembner of the Globe staff contributed to this report.