By Sam Graves

I believe that our priority with the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) ought to be enrolling children from low-income families who currently lack access to health care.

That is why I support reauthorizing the program with an increase in funding.

Every dollar of this expanded program we spend covering adults, children who previously had private health insurance and the families of illegal immigrants is money we are not spending on children this program is intended to help.

This expansion takes us away from the very reason SCHIP was created: to cover low-income children without health insurance.

The legislation that President Bush vetoed Wednesday would make it easier for illegal immigrants to get taxpayer-funded health care. The legislation would wipe away the current requirement for multiple sources of identification and require merely a name and a Social Security number to apply for benefits. The only safeguard would be a single statement that says no illegal immigrants can get benefits.

That’s like opening the door to the chicken coop but saying its OK because we put up a sign that says, “No Foxes Allowed.”

Illegal immigrants by their very definition have already broken the law. There are millions of illegal immigrants working and living in this country already with nothing more than a name and a Social Security number for identification.

Moreover, the cost of the expansion of this taxpayer-funded health-care program would be alarming. It is supposed to be funded by a 61-cent increase in tobacco taxes. However, the Heritage Foundation found that we would need 22 million new smokers to generate enough tobacco tax revenue to pay for this expansion.

This bill is mandatory funding, meaning that when the tax fails to pay for the bill, Congress will have to raise taxes or cut spending on other programs.

Additionally, you might have missed the news that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton helped get a waiver for her state to include families who make as much as $83,000 a year in the program. That is 400 percent above the poverty level.

Missouri taxpayers should not be paying the health-care costs for families in New York that make over $80,000 a year. Nor should they be paying for adults, which some states allow.

Finally, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the expansion of this government-run health-care initiative would likely mean that 2 million kids who already have private insurance would opt for their states’ government-run health-care program. In Missouri, that would involve a waiting period. That isn’t fixing a problem, it’s increasing government.

I hope that we can come together and reauthorize the current program before it expires in November.

Expanding the program could extend benefits to illegal immigrants and families who already have health insurance, and would place the entire program in questionable financial shape without sufficient funding to pay for its own largesse.