Sick Kids Love Cigarettes

Article By Writer Michael Kraft Author: Michael Kraft
Published: October 23, 2007
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This joke ad appearing on You Tube will no doubt make the leftist San Francisco hippies cringe.
The pain comes from the ad making an accurate point.

The SCHIP expansion the Democratic leadership is fighting for is to be funded by smokers.

This is the kind of ignoring common sense that seems to come up from letist liberals around every election cycle.

There aren’t enough smokers now to fund the program, here is the plea for more kids to get out there and light up……

Do it for the children.

Here’s more on the SCHIP/tobacco issue from David Hogberg’s paper for the National Center for Public Policy Research:

“The way in which the legislation reauthorizing SCHIP is written will undoubtedly makethe program into one that is regressive. But the fact is that SCHIP is already unfair; thus, the legislation currently before Congress would only worsen it.

SCHIP is unfair in the sense that, through SCHIP, the federal government gives proportionally more money to children who are not as poor as the children on Medicaid. …….In 2006, states spent a total of about $132 billion on Medicaid, while the federal government matched that with $165 billion. That means, on average, the federal government spends 1.2 dollars on Medicaid for every one dollar the states spend. For that same year, states spent almost $2.4 billion on SCHIP and the federal government sent the states $4.8 billion in matching funds. Thus, the federal government spends two dollars on SCHIP for every one dollar the states spend. In short, the federal government spends proportionally more on the children in SCHIP than it does on the poorer children in Medicaid.

The legislation passed by Congress takes this unfair system and makes it regressive. First, much of the new funding for SCHIP comes from a large increase in the cigarette tax. As Table 1 shows, people with incomes under 200 percent of the poverty level smoke at rates higher than those with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty level…….It is not inconceivable that a parent with one child with an income of $13,690 will be funding benefits for two children in a family of four with an income of $82,600. In short, SCHIP expansion would result in families whose income puts them in the bottom 15 percent of households funding benefits for children who are in families close to the top 25 percent of households.”

SCHIp love smokers to save the poor little children