When Pork Trumps “The Children” (or, How Many Health Insurance Plans Could You Have Bought With the Money they’re Spending?)

Man, that Tom Coburn is one smart cookie and the Senate Democrats are a bunch of feckless weasels.

Why do I say that? Well, do you remember the past two weeks when you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Washington and not hit a Democrat nearly in tears about how George Bush and the Republicans want children to get sick and die because they were opposed to expanding the S-CHIP program by 35 billion dollars? Do you remember how many times (approximately one bazillion times, by my count) we were told that all that money was for “the children” and how the President was hurting “the children” and how the Democrats simply adored “the children”? I’m not sure how you could have missed it. I’m fairly sure I saw Nancy Pelosi driving around the beltway with a big speaker strapped to the roof her car like the was a Blues Brother hawking their concert at the Palace Hotel Ballroom.

Tuesday, Senator Coburn threw down on the Senate and asked it to put our money where it’s mouth is. His amendment would have diverted every single dollar of earmarks attached to the Labor/HHS/Education appropriations bill right into health care for children. That money could easily have gone straight into the S-CHIP program, the very thing the Democrats have been harping about. So how did the amendment fare?

Not well. Not well at all.

Led by all but two voting Democrats, the amendment was defeated 68-26. Only two Democrats, Claire McCaskill and Russ Feingold voted against it. Six Senators did not vote, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and Republican John McCain. It’d be an interesting tihng, I think, if each of them were asked at their next campaign stop how they would have voted on the amendment and why they would have voted that way. The answers would be illuminating, especially in the cases of Obama and Clinton.

Twenty-one Republicans also voted for the bill so they’re not off the hook very much at all for this exercise in Senatorial gluttony. Most blame goes to the Dems, though, as 46 of them decided that sweetheart projects for their home states (very often bought with lavish campaign donations) were more important to them than sending more money to childrens’ health programs.

Now, I’m not in favor of pork or expanded government health care programs. Neither one is good for us as individuals or as a nation. However, given the monumental tantrums we’ve seen from the Democratic side of the aisle over the President S-CHIP veto, this is a stunning example of hypocrisy from folks who promised us they’d be cleaning up Washington when they were handed the majority in the last election.

Ed Morrissey gives us a taste of some of where our tax money is going to go:

* $400,000 for Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, for exhibits, education programs, and community outreach;
* $100,000 for a celebration around Lake Champlain in Vermont;
* $500,000 for field trips in the Chesapeake Bay;
* $500,000 for the “Virtual Herbarium” in New York;
* $50,000 for an ice center in Utah; and
* $130,000 for the National First Ladies’ Library Catalogue in Ohio.

I wonder how many parents could have bought their children good health care with that money? Let’s do some quick calculations.

Assume that health care costs 1200 dollars a month, which is right about what the Frosts alleged it would have cost them to get health care for their family before their car accident.

If just the few earmarks that Morrissey listed were spent directly on buying a $1200/month health insurance program, you could have bought 1,400 months of health insurance. That’s enough to insure a single family the size of the Frost family (Dad, Mom, and and four children) for 116 years.

Or, if you like, you could buy 116 families health insurance for the entire year with that money.

If you use the lower rate found by Insureblog ($641 a month, with no deductible and $20 co-pays), then you could insure 216 families for a year.

And, folks, that only a fraction of the earmarks that were in that appropriations bill. Imagine how many families could have bought health insurance for themselves had our Congress been more interested in helping the children and less interested in paying back their political contributors and buying votes with our money.

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Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, The Economy and Your Money