The Week

Vice President Gore very decently offered to fly all the way from New Hampshire to attend Bill Clinton’s Inaugural.

“If the [Republicans] don’t come around, we’ll use children’s health the way we used Medicare, and that’s a promise and a commitment,” AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the American Public health Association recently. We have been warned: an alleged upsurge in the number of children without health insurance will figure prominently in the liberal establishment’s Winter-Spring Offensive. But Merrill Matthews, writing for the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, points out that a) the “upsurge” is still quite small; b) costly mandated benefits, like compulsory maternity leave, are forcing employers to cancel health-insurance policies, exposing children; and c), uninsured children are disproportionately immigrants and the children of immigrants-overall, 40.6 per cent of foreign-born non-citizens were uninsured in 1995, versus only 13.6 per cent of the native-born. “Any nationwide program for children threatens to evolve into an entitlement program primarily benefitting legal and illegal immigrants,” writes Matthews. he and the NCPA are to be congratulated for exposing liberal-establishment hokum-and for ignoring conservative-establishment blindness about the immigrant dimension of many American policy problems.

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Vice President Gore very decently offered to fly all the way from New Hampshire to attend Bill Clinton’s Inaugural.

“If the [Republicans] don’t come around, we’ll use children’s health the way we used Medicare, and that’s a promise and a commitment,” AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the American Public health Association recently. We have been warned: an alleged upsurge in the number of children without health insurance will figure prominently in the liberal establishment’s Winter-Spring Offensive. But Merrill Matthews, writing for the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, points out that a) the “upsurge” is still quite small; b) costly mandated benefits, like compulsory maternity leave, are forcing employers to cancel health-insurance policies, exposing children; and c), uninsured children are disproportionately immigrants and the children of immigrants-overall, 40.6 per cent of foreign-born non-citizens were uninsured in 1995, versus only 13.6 per cent of the native-born. “Any nationwide program for children threatens to evolve into an entitlement program primarily benefitting legal and illegal immigrants,” writes Matthews. he and the NCPA are to be congratulated for exposing liberal-establishment hokum-and for ignoring conservative-establishment blindness about the immigrant dimension of many American policy problems.