What is SCHIP's goal?

Watch out. Medicare for everyone is being introduced incrementally.

Several years ago, Republicans created the State Children's Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP). They hoped it would allow low income parents to purchase or find health insurance for their children. As is too often the case, there have been unintended results.

First, it gave some employers the ability to off-load a portion of their dependent coverage for low income workers. Why have the group plan pay when the state is willing?

Second, states expanded this program for children so that some low income adults would qualify(it should now be State Children's And Adult Low Income Insurance Plan-SCHALIAIP). Great. A program for children is now a program for adults.

Third, Congress, as usual, needs to spend more on programs that grew beyond their original concept, costing billions more in tax dollars.

But even considering these issues, what strikes me is the hidden agenda.

For those who want the U.S. to embrace a government health plan run from Washington, D.C., this is the perfect subterfuge. Grace-Marie Turner recently wrote that raising the enrollment guidelines to include children in families with income up to 400 percent of the poverty level would include more than 70 percent of all children - to age 25.

This feels an awful lot like Medicare from birth to 25, and Medicare from 65 to death. I suggested this to Grace-Marie and she missed my point. She correctly stated that this is Medicaid for everyone.

But my point is simpler: Once 70 percent of children have spent all of their lives on a government health plan, why would they want anything different? They wouldn't have a clue about the benefits of a free market health system because they will have never participated. When Congressman Iama Statist introduces the Comprehensive Universal Health Insurance Plan (CUHIP), far greater than 50 percent of Americans will already be on the dole, and it will pass.

Goodbye free market health care.

Leave SCHIP at 200 percent of poverty level for now. Then find a way to dump it and replace it with a new free market plan. Please.