bush vetoes health insurance for kids

Our beloved U.S. president recently vetoed a bill that would have brought insurance to approximately ten million uninsured children. The bill would have been funded by a tax increase on cigarettes, which I see as quite fitting. The effects of secondhand cigarette smoke are well known and can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, so why not let those who smoke cover some of the cost of healthcare. We can also thank cigarette smokers for the overall cost of health insurance being so much. Bush claims that he has vetoed this bill so that he can be "more involved" in its details, which basically means that he wants to give the cigarette corporations more time to instruct him on how to best water it down. He states that when all is done, it will still offer coverage for an estimated 500,000 children. So it's not a total loss. I'm sure that the other 9.5 million American children will understand.

It's truly a shame that we as a country can afford to spend billions on the welfare of other countries in the middle east while so many in our own country cannot afford their own health insurance. We've got extraneous coverage like vacation insurance and pet insurance, but we have no basic national healthcare coverage for human beings. It's even worse when you consider that other countries who are considerably less "advanced" than we claim to be have national healthcare programs for their citizens that apparently work quite well.

I'm a bit torn when it comes to government interference. I know that the idea of government regulated costs may not seem fair to medical professionals, but their fees to me don't seem very fair, either. And it seems that private insurance coverage has done nothing but skew those fees into extremely unrealistic amounts, like when the hospital charges you $6 for a drinking straw. Unfortunately, medical institutions aren't really to blame, but rather those who take advantage of the system without paying into it what they take out of it - the bogus malpractice suits, illegal aliens and yes, the smokers. Sure, smokers pay more for health insurance but they pay very little for what they do to those around them.

You can't really compare this with other insurance industries. There aren't any easily recognizable "second-hand" effects on things like home insurance or car insurance, although one could argue that uninsured motorists do their fair share of inflating our rates. So when do we fix health insurance and make it so that self-inflicting high-risk individuals understand the consequence (and cost) of their lifestyle choices?

This latest veto is just another example of how big tobacco still has a voice (or a stronghold) on any decisions being made in Washington that might affect their bottom line or persuade smokers to quit. And as long as big business has control, the interest of the individual (and their health) will always be low priority.