There’s been a lot of shameful demagoguery and politicking in the health-care debate. But thanks to some 2 a.m. legislative maneuvering, the Democrats’ irrational hostility toward private insurance, and grandstanding by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.V.), we may have set a new low. Because of a little-noted amendment by Senator Rockefeller to the health-insurance bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), children will be denied private coverage and stuck in Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) — even though these programs provide fewer benefits and substandard care.

Health-care policy can be dizzying to follow, but, in a nutshell, here are the problems with what happened. (1) We have a multi-millionaire oil scion telling people that they’re better off under government health-care programs than with private insurance. (2) We have a senator insisting that private insurance companies are predatory, when all evidence shows that it’s being in Medicaid that jeopardizes your health. (3) We have a senator insisting that what he’s doing is right for poor children, when in reality he’s finding a new way to collect taxes — so he can use that money to buy off amendments from other senators to move a piece of legislation forward.

In Baucus’s bill before the Senate Finance Committee amended it, children in households earning between 133 and 250 percent of the federal poverty level would have been eligible for tax subsidies with which to buy private coverage — giving them an incentive to leave state Medicaid and S-CHIP programs (and giving states an excuse to reduce the eligibility threshold for those programs to 133 percent). In addition, in the few instances where Medicaid covered things private insurance didn’t, Medicaid would have provided supplemental coverage. Under the Baucus plan, as many as 9 million children would have been moved out of Medicaid and S-CHIP and into private insurance plans, thus receiving more complete coverage and better access to providers.

However, in Senate Finance Committee hearings that dragged into the wee hours of Friday October 2, Senator Rockefeller lobbied hard for an amendment that scuttled Baucus’s plan. Rockefeller’s amendment keeps these kids on Medicaid and S-CHIP through 2019. (That’s the same misleading ten-year window Democrats have chosen to hide health reform’s true costs.)

This move saves some $15 billion, and possibly as much as $25 billion; under the original version of the bill, when parents bought private insurance for their kids, they’d have done so with pre-tax dollars, which would have cost the government revenue. Democrats freed up this money to buy off other senators who were proposing amendments — this way, they can complete the amendment process in a single large “wrap-up” amendment and move the bill forward. The bottom line, according to one Senate Finance Committee aide, is this: “The Left felt so strongly in their hatred of private coverage that they moved kids out of it, even if it cost them benefits.”

It almost certainly means worse health outcomes for poor kids forced to stay in Medicaid without additional coverage. A 2009 Medicaid survey by Merritt Hawkins and Associates found that over half of all specialists in many major metropolitan areas refuse to take on new Medicaid patients. According to the survey, “Medicaid is not widely accepted in most markets surveyed, in at least some of the medical specialties reviewed, and, in some cases, all of them.”

And there’s near-universal agreement that people in Medicaid are worse off. “Accumulating medical data shows that Medicaid recipients’ poor health outcomes aren’t just a function of their underlying medical problems, but a more direct consequence of the program’s shortcomings,” wrote Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in the Wall Street Journal. Just to give one prominent example, a study published in the journal Cancer in 2005 found that Medicaid patients were two to three times more likely to die from the disease even when controlling for other variables. (There’s also the matter that Democrats are expanding Medicaid at a time when the Government Accountability Office says it’s a “high-risk” program and that 10 percent of spending in the program is fraudulent.)

As for S-CHIP, outcomes might prove better than Medicaid — but the children will be denied the supplemental Medicaid coverage the Baucus bill originally promised. The Rockefeller amendment means coverage for poor kids in S-CHIP is going to be substantially less complete than Democrats originally proposed. And while sorting out the real costs and effects of the amended Baucus bill is still nearly impossible, forcing kids to stay in S-CHIP could increase the already-perilous fiscal burden on states, says the Senate Finance Committee aide.

Despite the fact that he’s forcing kids into a health-care ghetto so the government can collect more taxes, Senator Rockefeller argued that he was doing children a favor. “I don’t believe that we can force vulnerable kids into private coverage. That’s what we’d be doing. They’d lose that special kind of defined benefit that comes under Medicaid,” he said during committee hearings, adding that under private insurance children would be “at the mercy of people that will have them for lunch.” Since when does being two to three times as likely to die from cancer constitute a “special kind of defined benefit”?

Considering that Democratic congressmen are being fêted for thundering from the House floor that “Republicans want you to die,” it ought to be worth noting that when it comes to making legislative sausage, Democrats are all too willing to throw kids into the grinder — even in exchange for less important political goals. They just do it at 2 a.m. and hope no one notices.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.