Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse drive Brendan Nyhan into shrill unholy madness:
Brendan Nyhan: NYT does "he said"/"she said" on SCHIP: How hard is it to try to resolve factual disputes over controversial policy issues? Too hard for the New York Times:
Mr. Bush argues that the expansion is too costly and would push people who could afford private insurance onto the government rolls, steering the program away from its initial aim of helping poor children. He said that states like New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and New Mexico spend more money on adults than children, and he reiterated his contention, which the authors of the bill dispute, that the measure could benefit some families earning up to $83,000 a year.
“That doesn’t sound poor to me,” the president said.
Welcome to the dystopia of "objective" journalism. What's particularly sad here is that other publications have already addressed this issue -- the Times could have just cribbed from them. For instance, here's the relevant passage from McClatchy that I praised on Monday:
President Bush claims that the bipartisan bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program "would result in taking a program meant to help poor children and turning it into one that covers children in households with incomes up to $83,000 a year."
That's not true.
The bill maintains current law. It limits the program to children from families with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level — now $20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300 — or to 50 percentage points above a state's Medicaid eligibility threshold, which varies state to state.
States that want to increase eligibility beyond those limits would require approval from Bush's Health and Human Services Department, just as they must win waivers now. The HHS recently denied a request by New York to increase its income threshold to four times the poverty level — the $82,600 figure that Republican opponents of the bill are using.
Under current law, nineteen states have won waivers from these income limits. The biggest was granted to New Jersey, which upped its income limit to 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four in 2007. The expanded SCHIP program retains the waiver option under federal discretion; it doesn't change it.
Any chance McClatchy can take over the NYT's Washington bureau?
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