The Democrats (and a some Republicans) want to increase funding for medical care for poor children. The specter of healthy poor children cased by the expenditure of tax money has so terrified GW Bush that it has turned him into a born-again fiscal tightwad, or so his stennographers would have it. (Actually, for some strange reason the stenography is silent on the subject of the children…)
The debate is pretty simple: how many kids to insure in the federal scheme, with the understanding that as the number grows, the program reaches up into the working poor and even if funded to Democratic levels, substantially above the poverty line.
The Speaker's office has more on the issue, along with a nice chart comparing the cost of this program to a few weeks of the Iraq occupation. (They call it a war.)
