S-CHIP And America's New Poor

You know, I thought that I was doing fairly well financially until I read the financial status of the Frosts. We were introduced to the Frost family by way of the Democrat's Saturday morning radio address. The Frost's son, Graeme, was pulling on the heartstrings of us heartless Republicans for not supporting the expanded S-CHIP. He and his sister were severely injured in a car accident and were financial supported from S-CHIP.
Well, the story could have ended there except a Freeper started investigating the Frost family. icwhatudo found that the Fosters weren't as financially distress as the Democrats presented them. Which led "icwhatudo" to question

One has to wonder that if time and money can be found to remodel a home, send kids to exclusive private schools, purchase commercial property and run your own business... maybe money can be found for other things...maybe Dad should drop his woodworking hobby and get a real job that offers health insurance rather than making people like me (also with 4 kids in a 600sf smaller house and tuition $16,000 less per kid and no commercial property ownership) pay for it in my taxes.

I am definitely less well off than the Frosts. They are sure living a lot higher on the hog than me, yet the Democrat Party expects me to pay for their health care costs. It is absolutely absurd to expand the S-CHIP to cover families in the upper middle class. The Frosts lack of insurance is not because of the lack of opportunity or resources but because the Frosts refuse to pay for it. They prefer some one else do it, while they enjoy life's luxuries.
This is the biggest problem with the S-CHIP. The new bill will cover more than 9 million kids at a cost of $60 billion. It will be paid for with a 61-cent hike in the tobacco tax. That tax will hit the poor hardest, they are the ones that can't afford the new tax. Since they can't afford it they will have to quit smoking, if they can. So, the expected revenue to cover the expanded S-CHIP program doesn't materialize. The program goes into the red and where do you think Congress is going to look for that money?
In addition, those it helps aren't poor. Under the new bill, families earning $83,000 a year could be eligible. If this bill were targeted at just the poor, President Bush and the Republicans wouldn't oppose it. But it isn't. It's a new, massively expanded middle-class entitlement that I am going to have to pay for.