With one stroke of his pen, President Bush has denied health insurance to 3.8 million kids who were due to get it under this bipartisan expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Supporters of legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program want to insure more children and they say the bill vetoed by President Bush would do just that. Right now, the SCHIP program is budgeted to spend $5 billion each year over the next five years. The legislation President Bush vetoed on Oct. 3, 2007 would add another $35 billion to the pot between the years 2008 and 2012. Families making 200 percent of the federal poverty line would be eligibile, and in some cases states could go beyond that to reach families with even higher incomes. Biden is using the statistic that most Democrats are using about the number of children who would become eligible under the SCHIP expansion. And, it's an estimate with solid backing, the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan research arm of Congress that calculates the cost of legislation.
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