This piece from the Chillicothe Gazette written by Ashley Phillips hit my email box this morning. In the piece, Ms. Phillips gets a quote from a spokesperson from Working America, an off-shoot of the AFL-CIO:Right now, our big issue is that President Bush wants to cut children's heath insurance, and we are asking people to join us in the fight to protect the children," said Eeshwaree Das, assistant canvas director.This is a deliberate distortion of the truth and if we had reporters in this state who weren't afraid to speak real truth to power, they would actually question these union thugs a bit more than the softballs usually offered up.
What President Bush, and most fiscal conservatives, are opposed to is not funding children's insurance. The president, and most fiscal conservatives, oppose the expansion of the definition of the word "children" to include adults aged 25. Programs like SCHIP were supposed to be part of a safety net and not the lifestyle that they have become.
This schmuck has the audacity to invoke The Children while outright lying about the position of this president and what does our heroine reporterette do? She goes right along...
"Our job is to go out and tell citizens what is going on in the government and have them help us change the legislation," said Das.Apparently, your job is to obfuscate facts. Let's go to the National Coalition on Health Care for some facts:
The number of uninsured children in 2005 was 8.3 million – or 11.2 percent of all children in the U.S. (1). The number of children who are uninsured increased by nearly 400,000 in 2005, breaking a trend of steady declines over the last five years.Note the wording there...care to guess how many of these children are here illegally? We've got 4.7 million of The Children (tm) living in "mixed status" families (Source), so I'd imagine the number is pretty high. It is not the American taxpayer's responsibility to provide for these kids. I know that sounds heartless, but we need to define this problem in ways that makes sense...and providing tax dollars for a safety net for AMERICAN kids ought to be the priority.
If health care for The Children (tm) were the all-important issue that union thugs and the fellow liberal organizations say that it is, they would denounce those living off the system who shouldn't be... Did our brave reporterette get around to presenting the other side of this issue? I sure hope you didn't waste your breath waiting on an objective report coming out of the Ohio media......
8/29 Update
Right Truth: "Almost half of uninsured in America are illegal aliens"
