Roy Carter on SCHIP

I apologize for the tardiness of this post; Roy Carter wrote this last week. I have moved up to Virginia and am helping a man run for Congress up here, and I didn't have time to post this until now.

Here is Roy Carter's response to Virginia Foxx' Op-ed in the Winston-Salem Journal on her vote against SCHIP.

This week my opponent, Virginia Foxx, caste yet another callous vote against the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Almost as distasteful as her vote was her justification for it in this very newspaper.

As a father, grandfather, and person of faith, this is an issue that I care deeply about. SCHIP allows families whose income is too high to receive Medicaid but do not have enough resources to pay for private insurance to be able to purchase insurance for their children, allowing them to stay healthy from a young age and reducing their burden on the health care system as they get older. The sad reality is that many citizens of Northwest North Carolina fit into this category—over 116,000 in the state of North Carolina.

Sadly, my opponent wishes to mislead the public into thinking that funding SCHIP relates to the immigration issue or that SCHIP could be given to adults. Those arguments are a complete fallacy. The reality that my opponent twists is that the age cap for SCHIP enrollment in some states may be raised from 19 to 21 in an effort to help college students to maintain health coverage and that all persons receiving coverage must be full citizens. College students are by age, technically, adults, but suffer from the same shortcomings that minors do in terms of ability to afford health care. Most students, particularly those coming from poor families like I did, can not afford coverage on their own, and the plans offered at universities and colleges are often expensive and insufficient.

The truth is that H.R. 976, the bill my opponent voted against, contains provisions to phase out the coverage of parents and childless adults in SCHIP. However, it provides coverage of pregnant women as a new state option as well as preserving the options to cover pregnant women through a state waiver or through regulation. Moreover, the bill is fully paid for by raising the tobacco tax by merely 61 cents a pack. The higher the cost of cigarettes, the less likely kids will take up smoking. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a 61-cent increase in the tobacco tax means that 1,873,000 fewer children will take up smoking. Furthermore, the vast majority of Members of the House and Senate – both Democratic and Republican –, including Rep. Foxx, are on record in favor of raising tobacco taxes. In August, all but 4 House members voted for the GOP motion to recommit that included an increase of 45 cents a pack in the tobacco tax.

H.R. 3584, the bill my opponent and 139 Republicans have co-sponsored, is a purely partisan attempt to extend the current program that merely allows her to delay the issue for 18 months. Meanwhile millions of kids remain uninsured. As the housing market gets worse and lower-middle income families continue to struggle, more kids won’t get the care they need. My opponent calls it a shell game, but I call it a hide-and-seek game. She wishes to throw up a series of false numbers and allegations to hide the fact that millions of children still need to be covered. Many of our kids can only be covered if the program is extended, and H.R. 976 provides this extension.

My opponent receives the best healthcare our tax dollars can buy, but will not provide the same for our children. We need a representative in Congress who will listen to the good people of the 5th district and not merely serve as a microphone for the President, major Pharmaceutical and Medical Insurance Companies.

Roy J. Carter

Please drop a contribution to Coach Carter to help him out.