By Bill Johnson

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Do you sometimes read the newspaper and, like me, just want to scream? And no, I am not talking just about this column.

Things do, though, simply jump out at you. And by the time the last word is digested, you just want to crawl back into bed. I am, of course, referring here to the silliness many of the dopes we perpetually send to Washington exhibit.

Specifically, I am referring to the spectacle of the attempted extension of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). If ever there was a noble, morally sound, let's-get-this-done-NOW, no-brainer piece of legislation, this one was it.

The background: The U.S. government today spends $5 billion a year to insure some 6.6 million uninsured children of the working poor in this country.

If that number doesn't make you spit your morning corn flakes, consider that a bill passed by the House on Wednesday would cover another 4.4 million children of uninsured low-income families, prevent cuts in physicians' Medicare payments scheduled for Jan. 1, increase assistance to low-income Medicare recipients and eliminate co-payments for most preventative care they receive.

Apparently it is only in church where assisting the least among us holds any truck. Less so in D.C., that's for sure.

The House bill barely squeaked though Wednesday on a mostly Democratic-led partisan vote of 225 to 204. The Senate was expected to pass a similar version, setting up a threatened veto showdown with the White House. The president calls the legislation expansive, a step toward socialized medicine in America.

It was precisely the argument that caught me cold.

If you can absorb the idea that Washington has discovered an additional 4.4 million uninsured poor kids in America, it raises several questions:

How can a country that bills itself as the greatest ever have 11 million kids running around without health care and, even at a worst-case sum of $75 billion - or about $25 billion less than what it spends in one year in Iraq - not have the moral sense to pick up the tab?

Maybe it is just wishful, Catholic-upbringing, dummy me, but taking care of poor sick kids kind of sounds like the very least a very wealthy, self-described Christian nation would do.

"It expands government- run health care beyond anything any of us could have imagined in the last 10 years," House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio huffed on the floor this week.
Not a word about the kids and what they might need.

Our very own Tom Tancredo, the Littleton Republican, at least held to form. He opposed the measure, he said this week, because sick children of illegal immigrants just might see an American doctor on our dime. That would seem a little outrageous had anyone other than ol' Tommy said it.

On the other hand, it was why I called Diana DeGette, the congresswoman from Denver, who may have fought the hardest for the House bill's passage.

She goes back to 1997 with SCHIP, she explains, a time when Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office and Newt Gingrich was in the House speaker's seat. It passed and was funded, no problem.

"The problem today is the president is underfunding it," she explained. "There is no current funding mechanism to pay for any of it - even the current $5 billion comes from deficit spending. We've said we'll do more and we will pay for it."

The House bill funds the additional $75 billion it calls for over five years by raising the federal cigarette tax 45 cents a pack to 84 cents.

"Here's what I think," the congresswoman said. "Their objection was not about socialized medicine. It wasn't even about the kids. Every Republican in the House and Senate supported this bill until they realized it would give Democrats a big victory. It's a disgrace."

She tells the story of a Denver woman who traveled to Washington to testify on the bill. The woman was married to an abuser, whom she ultimately escaped from, along with her two young children.

She took a job as a janitor and enrolled in school. She applied for and received Medicaid for the two kids. Well, she was good at her job and was promoted.

The little bit of extra pay made her ineligible for the kids' Medicaid.

"That's who we're talking about," Diana DeGette said. "It's the working poor, about providing their kids and the elderly with wellness care before they get sick and have to go to the emergency room to see a doctor."

Yet what of the president's promised veto of any such bill that comes out of Congress?

Diana DeGette laughed, saying she knows well such a sting, George Bush having wielded one of the only two veto pens he's used in seven years on her stem cell research legislation.

"I think it would be a very poor choice for him on this bill, one that would cover millions of poor children in the country, thousands in Colorado, to make it his next veto.

"An override? A better question is whether his party wants to go into the 2008 elections standing by the veto of a bill that would help millions of poor children."

Maybe someday they will even start talking seriously about their parents' plight.