Four regional directors of the Department of Health and Human Services signed their names on copycat letters sent to editorial pages across the country, spreading misinformation about opposing children's health insurance proposals...

All four somehow managed to come up with identical wording for the same dishonest points.

For example: "The President supports reauthorizing this important program for low income children [the State Children's Health Insurance Program] with enough new funding to ensure that no one currently enrolled loses coverage."

This is a flat lie. Bush's proposal would take away coverage from some currently enrolled kids by imposing a federal income limit on eligibility. (Currently, states have the flexibility to set their own limits.)

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that "about 200,000 children who would otherwise be covered through SCHIP in 2012 would instead be uninsured" by a Senate GOP proposal which follows Bush's stated principles.

And the head of the American Academy of Family Physicians, Dr. Rick Kellerman of Wichita, KS, lambasted the president's paltry funding as insufficient to simply maintain the level of children's coverage that currently exists: "By not providing the funding needed to maintain the program, the Bush administration is stripping health care for indigent children and families."

The copycat letter from the HHS hacks also says that the bills expanding SCHIP, approved by the House and Senate, would: "extend eligibility to millions of children who already have private insurance or whose parents earn enough to afford private insurance..."

This is merely misleading and disingenuous.

The White House spin tries to make you believe this money will be spent on people who don't need any help.

In fact, nearly all the proposed funds would reach kids who are either uninsured or underinsured with inadequate private coverage. (The Senate bill would cover an additional 3-4 million uninsured children, out of 9 million.)

Contrast that with Bush's health insurance proposal, largely consisting of tax breaks. More than 75% of Bush's benefits would go to families that already have coverage. (Further, it would fail to increase the overall number of insured kids.)...

The whole idea of the program is to provide states the flexibility to meet their needs. Ninety percent of the funds goes to families earning less than $41,000 (for a family of four), while states with middle-class families who are still squeezed aren't left out in the cold.

This bogus letter operation is just a part of Bush's larger spin campaign, detailed by Art Levine for In These Times, to defeat any expansion of children's health insurance...

These dishonest tactics must be exposed, because the health of our kids is at risk.