The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid are expanding far beyond their initial boundaries. These programs are covering many people who have no business milking the system as they do. It is shameful for people to act in this way and it is even more shameful for our government to promote it.

SCHIP was created by Congress in 1997 so children who were unable to receive health care could be covered. The whole idea was to provide health care to these kids because their families were too poor, but as it turns out that isn’t quite the case these days. Currently, the program enrolls about 6.6 million children and 670,000 adults. I can almost hear you gasping for breath, but hold on it gets worse. When Congress created the SCHIP program, more than 60 percent of the eligible children already had private health insurance. In 2005, 55 percent of eligible children had private health insurance. Moreover, SCHIP provides insurance to children in families earning up to 350 percent of the federal poverty level. Our good friends in New York want to increase the eligibility cutoff in their state to 400 percent of the FPL. That's roughly $82,000 per year for a family of four.

It is pretty obvious what the government is trying to do here. These programs crowd out private health care providers and drive up prices for private insurance purchasers. If private health care is cost prohibitive and everyone is eligible to receive “free” health care, the government will eventually control the whole system. In fact, economists estimate that Medicaid’s current eligibility rules discourage between 66 and 90 percent of seniors from buying private insurance. In other words, their plan seems to be working, so much so that Democrats in Congress want to increase federal SCHIP funding by almost $60 billion over the next five years.

There are a couple of reasons I bring all this up. First, we cannot allow the state to effectively take over an entire industry because it feels like it. What industry is next after health care? Second, candidates are beginning to share their health care plans with us and we need to make sure we read between the lines on these proposals. Always concentrate on how these plans could be abused by the government, because chances are they will be.