S-Chip and the Catholic Church

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 12, 2007

There is much being made, both inside and outside the Church, about President Bush's October 3 veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP, pronounced S-Chip) and the Congressional vote scheduled for next Thursday to attempt to override it.

The SCHIP program was first passed a decade ago by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton. It provided federal money to the states in the form of block grants to ensure that children whose parents were ineligible for Medicaid because they were above the poverty line but below twice the poverty line and thus often incapable of affording family insurance, would be covered. The 1997 version of SCHIP covered 6.6 million children, "from conception until age 19." Back in 1997, it was passed and budgeted for a ten-year trial period. It needed to be reauthorized by the end of September.

President Bush was on record in favor of reauthorizing that original bill and expanding its funding.

But the Democratic Congressional leadership tried to take advantage of the almost universal desire to make children from poor families have access to adequate health care to try to add to the reauthorization bill unacceptable items for which President Bush was right to veto it and for which congressmen and senators should vote not to override the veto until these unacceptable elements are stripped from it.

The secular media has focused most of its attention on the economic changes that the Democratic leadership added to the SCHIP reauthorization bill about which President Bush objected. They wanted to ensure children of families up to three times the poverty line, and President Bush wanted it remain at twice the poverty line. Democratic leaders wanted to increase funding by $35 billion by adding a 61-cent federal cigarette tax while President Bush wanted to increase it by $5 billion with no tax. Democrats view their bill as a means by which to care for lower middle class families who can no longer afford skyrocketing health insurance payments; Bush and Republican leaders see it as the beginning of socialized medicine, by giving middle class families an incentive to leave private insurance for government insurance. These are all economic issues upon which Catholic citizens can legitimately disagree about which is more prudent overall.

But the reason why President Bush vetoed the reauthorization bill go beyond concerns about money, taxes and the role of government. The reauthorization bill adds and deletes items that Bush says change and exceed the original SCHIP mandate.

Among other things, the rewritten SCHIP pays for contraceptives to be distributed to teenagers without parental permission or even knowledge. It authorizes the diversion of previously allocated abstinence education funds to condom pushing campaigns. It permits tax dollars to be used for sterilizations according to individual state policies. And worst of all, it promotes and funds abortions.

In the original SCHIP passed by a pro-life House and Senate, the bill provided funds for children "from conception to age 19." In order to help children, various programs for poor pregnant women over 19 were covered as well. In the new SCHIP, the reference "from conception to age 19" is excised and among the "reproductive care" covered for poor women — in 17 states that allow it — will be tax-payer funded abortions.

This means that in the very bill that is supposed to provide at risk children with health care will also be promoting the death of the most vulnerable.

President Bush has used his veto only four times in his almost seven years in office. One occurred when he vetoed what he called an artificial pullout time-table for the troops in Iraq. On both other occasions, he vetoed funding to expand the destruction of human life through embryonic stem cell research. The veto of SCHIP was another pro-life veto.

It is obvious that children from poor families need access to good health care. This is something that almost all citizens and legislators support. For this reason it is particularly nefarious that pro-abortion Congressmen and Senators have tried to manipulate the SCHIP reauthorization process to use it as a vehicle to advance immoral ends. Just as one rotten apple can spoil the cart, so pushing the destruction of babies can vitiate a bill that is supposed to care for them.

If the attempt to overturn the veto fails to garner a bicameral two-thirds majority on October 18, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promises to bring it up again for a vote and send it to the President's desk again. Should that happen, it should be stripped first of its morally objectionable aspects; otherwise the president would be right to veto it again.

There's one last item that needs to be mentioned candidly with regard to SCHIP. Two prominent Catholic organizations, the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA (which is totally independent of our Catholic Charities Appeal), have both come out publicly in favor of overriding President Bush's veto. Their leaders have been much quoted in the Catholic and secular press and featured prominently in the mobilization alerts of SCHIP supporters. Both organizations have energetically encouraged Congress to pass the new SCHIP and override the President's decision. They've stated that American children need the President's help, not his veto.

While both organizations do a lot of good, they are both scandalously wrong on this issue. It should be safe to assume that their leadership is well-informed about all the aspects of the SCHIP reauthorization bill. While there are many laudable aspects to the bill, and the CHA and CC-USA are right to praise those aspects, no amount of immunization shots and free doctor's visits can outweigh the tax-payer funded destruction of innocent human babies through abortion. Catholic organizations should not be able to be bribed to look the other way on intrinsically evil actions by the promise of good things of a lesser order.

The SCHIP debate makes clear that the leadership of both organizations need to realign their hierarchy of values with that of the Catholic Church they claim to represent. Pope Benedict teaches in his latest apostolic letter, Sacramentum Caritatis, that there are issues, like abortion, that are non-negotiable, no matter how many praiseworthy enticements are added to the negotiations. Until such a realignment of their values takes place, Catholics should be wary to follow their endorsements

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.