10/30/00 1:20 p.m.
Al Gore, Unfit Leader
Bush is not the one voter should be worried about.

By Robert Goldberg, National Center for Policy Analysis

he closing argument Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are making in their own behalf is that George W. Bush is not ready to be president. Exhibit A is their claim that Bush failed to enroll children in the federal program that provides states with money for the State Child Health Insurance Program (known fondly as Kidcare), passed by Congress in 1996. It's true that Texas avoided rushing and took it slow, but in the long-run kids in Texas will have health care they can count on. It turns out that up to 80 percent of the kids who enrolled in the program are probably going to have to forcibly removed and required to reregister for Medicaid. This is especially the case for illegal immigrants, who can get Medicaid but not Kidcare.

The question is, who is responsible for the massive screw-up in enrollment, a policy rush job that will, in the opinion of many state health officials mean that many kids will simply lose health insurance they once had? Who is responsible for the sort of failure on a national level that supposedly makes George Bush unfit to govern on a state level?

Al Gore of course.

Here's what happened. Kidcare was supposed to enroll 5 million uninsured children. Since the program started in 1996, only 2 million children have enrolled. Half of those were supposedly transferred from pre-existing state programs and many of the rest would have otherwise been eligible for and enrolled in Medicaid. The Clinton-Gore administration panicked and came up with a strategy to boost enrollment and avoid being caught double counting: encourage advocacy groups and states to combine Medicaid and Kidcare enrollment and worry about the true eligibility eligible later.

Gore then invented (and took credit for) another outreach effort. Less than a year ago he kicked off an ambitious program to promote Kidcare, believing that not enough people know about the program. His effort spent tens of millions advertising the program on everything from school-lunch menus to the tops of pizza boxes. Just a week ago, the White House announced it was giving community-health centers still more money to tell the uninsured about health-care coverage because the federal government wasn't doing enough outreach (the same accusation Gore has flung at Bush in Texas).

Many governors, cowed by advocacy groups and seduced by the fact that Kidcare pumped more money into their states than Medicaid did, ignored the impact this might have on individual families and rushed a program into implementation. Still others simply pushed every family into one big managed-care program run by Medicaid. Only a handful of governors tried to design a program that actually gave families money to make a choice in the private marketplace. Only one governor had concerns about what would happen if immigrants got caught in the Clinton-Gore bait-and-switch. He was, of course, George W. Bush. He wanted a stand-alone program with separate programs criteria and application processes for Medicaid and Kidcare, something liberal-advocacy groups and the White House opposed.

In the end, kids in Texas will not be yanked from their homes. Those living in the Potemkin medical villages of Al Gore most certainly will.

The claim that Bush is hurting children in Texas with his health-care policies can be more appropriately leveled at Mr. Gore, inventor of the health-care-pizza-box outreach effort. The fact is, despite Kidcare, children have no more health-care coverage now than they did when the law was passed in 1996. Forty percent of the money is unspent. Fifty percent of the kids enrolled will be found to be Medicaid eligible and illegally enrolled in Kidcare.

Another promise made, another person betrayed. What an unfit leader.