Rosenbaum describes the ideological determination that led President Bush to veto and then veto again the bipartisan reauthorization of SCHIP, the federal healthcare program for uninsured poor children. I've included portions of Rosenbaum's essay below (with highlighting mine).

Here's Rosenbaum's bottom line: "So determined does the administration appear to be to halt the growth of a health insurance architecture it opposes... that it will flout the law and punish thousands of children in order to achieve its goals."

Rosenbaum explains why the President's objections to SCHIP obscure his intransient ideological opposition. In this case – as in so many others – top-down conservative preconception determines the outcome.

By the way, the healthcare architecture that Bush finds so heinous (despite its bipartisan Congressional support and – any neutral observer would concur – compelling benefits for the nation's children) relies on the federal government creating insurable groups of children, where the need for healthcare-coverage arises from a lack of family resources to obtain coverage in any other way.

As sobering as President Bush's priorities might be (ideology trumping human need and benefit), what's truly obscene is that the President – and his conservative fellow travelers – hold out no alternative to the children whose parents' modest income denies them healthcare. The President's ideology neither acknowledges the legitimacy of these children's plight nor considers their plight a defect in the delivery of healthcare that government can help to rectify.

Which is to say that, as far as Bush is concerned, needy children can die. Bush's free-market fundamentalism offers no other remedy to these children's healthcare situation, despite Bush's assertion that "[P]eople have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

The Proxy War – SCHIP and the Government's Role in Health Care Reform
"The conflagration over the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) offers a compelling example of Washington's current inability to address even seemingly uncontroversial matters such as improved health care coverage for children. After the House failed to override President George W. Bush's veto of a SCHIP expansion in October, Congressional leaders regrouped to develop a compromise measure that would address Bush's claim that the original bill "moves the health care system in the wrong direction."

"Ironically, the Congressional Budget Office projected that all but 500,000 of the 3.8 million previously uninsured children who would have received coverage by 2012 under the reauthorization in fact would have qualified under SCHIP's previous eligibility standards but would have benefited from the new legislation's expanded enrollment assistance. In other words, the measure truly "put poor children first," as demanded by the President."

"[T]he SCHIP battle turns out not to have been about family-income assistance levels or the mechanism for financing coverage subsidies (although both the Medicare managed-care industry and the tobacco companies weighed in noisily on the latter question). Instead, the issue became the role of government in organizing and overseeing the health care marketplace... SCHIP uses the power of government to form insured groups, select qualified plans, oversee plan operations, and measure results."

"In the end, the SCHIP battle became a proxy war over the duties that government should assume in national health care reform."

"The effort to stop SCHIP was aided by the toxic atmosphere in Washington and the administration's labeling of SCHIP as a middle-class boondoggle."

"The veto "played well in the South" for the administration, according to this expert..."

"The administration's war over efforts to move the health care system in the "wrong direction" has not been limited to vetoes."

"In sum, what the administration could not achieve through legislation it has sought to achieve by fiat, including administrative directives that appear to run afoul of other federal laws, such as ERISA."

"The President's own tax plan – which is not income-related – underscores the reality that the issue with regard to SCHIP was never the level of family income that would qualify children for a subsidy. Bush's tax proposal also suggests that the real concern is not health insurance crowd-out: estimates show that his tax-credit plan would have a far greater crowd-out effect than any proposed expansion of SCHIP and would result in a net gain of only 3 million insured people."

UPDATE, Thursday, June 12, 2008: To the left you see a photo of President Bush on the cover of this month's Citizen magazine, which is published by the political arm of Focus On The Family. The photo promotes the most potent of right-wing stratagems: Pro-life... until birth.

The fact that the precious baby in Bush's arms might be sick and poor and unable to purchase the health insurance coverage needed to pay for medical interventions that might be required, for example, to remedy a congenital condition – All of that "truly" means nothing, when compared with the paramount right-wing demand to support the fiction of market fundamentalism, regardless of collateral human cost. The right-winger's interest isn't life. It's the support of an ideology that locates burdens and repercussions on anyone other than the right-winger themself, as described by Sara Rosenbaum, above, in her review of the politics that killed SCHIP.

It's no surprise that the Christianists at Focus On The Family participated in the torpedoing of SCHIP. Their culpability in denying aid to needy children is their own legacy. "Suffer the little children", indeed.

Having said all of that, you've got to smile, today, at Bush's defensive response to protesters who greeted his state visit to Italy. He responded, "We are compassionate, we're an open country, we care about people and we're entrepreneurial." You might wonder what those words mean to him, but it's no mystery (hint: Pro-life... until birth).