Controversy of the week

Subsidized health care: How poor is needy?

No wonder nobody talks about compassionate conservatism anymore, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. Before President Bush’s veto last week of an expanded S-CHIP program, which provides health care to needy children not poor enough to qualify for Medicare, 12-year-old Graeme Frost of Baltimore recorded a radio appeal in support of the bill. Frost and his sister suffered serious brain injuries in a 2004 car crash, and have relied on the S-CHIP program for their extended hospital stays, rehabilitation, and subsequent care. No sooner did the political advertisement air, however, than right-wing bloggers and talk-show hosts started attacking the Frosts. The Frosts, the critics said with no little venom, are middleclass homeowners who own three cars and send their children to private school! By relying on a government-funded health-care program, they were obviously ripping off the system.

Within days, the attack on Graeme and his family had become an "all-out smear campaign," said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Columnist Michelle Malkin even drove past the Frosts' house for a closer look at its opulence . . . and then the story started falling apart. It seems the Frosts paid a mere $55,000 for their dilapidated house in 1990 and spent years fixing it up themselves. The children attend private school on scholarship. The couple has a household income of only $45,000, with no employer-provided health insurance. Even if you have no sympathy for the working poor, what kind of "vicious political movement" makes its arguments by attacking injured children?

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Let me see if I have this straight, said William Voegeli in The New York Sun. It was fine for Democrats to use the Frosts' predicament to make a political point, but an unspeakable act of savagery for conservatives to then investigate that predicament? That seems a little unfair. All conservatives are asking, said Mark Steyn in National Review Online, is for an honest debate on whether taxpayers should bestow free health care on middle-class families as well as the poor. If Democrats don't want the Graeme Frosts of this world dragged into that debate, maybe "next time put up someone in long pants to make your case."

Admittedly, the Democrats used the boy to make a political point, said Cynthia Tucker in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was over "an issue that matters-health care for children of working families." Republicans, you'll recall, carpeted the nation with upsetting photographs of a comatose Terri Schiavo to stoke their conservative base into a frenzy. "It seems a bit churlish of them to complain when the tables are turned." In fairness, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com, the right probably had to demonize a brain-damaged 12-year-old. "They know they're on the losing side of this issue, politically and morally."

No, we're not, said syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. First of all, the bill the president vetoed didn't even apply to families like the Frosts, who are already covered by S-CHIP. What the president vetoed was the expansion of that program to cover middle-class families making up to $62,000 a year-which would hand another $35 billion in costs to overburdened taxpayers. A majority of Americans, according to the polls, doesn't support that expansion. That's why Democrats deliberately obscured the debate behind a flurry of "Romper Room politics." When this war of anecdote is over, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, we can all agree on one thing. "It's hard for some lower-income families like the Frosts to find affordable private health coverage." The real issue is whether the best solution is for the government-and taxpayers-to step into that gap, and provide the coverage for free.