The federal-funded health insurance program for children has been finally given a green light, after months of gridlock with the Congress. President Bush signed a temporary extension of the State’s Children Health Insurance Program, which will provide federal funding until March 31, 2009, when the Congress and future president are to decide the next step.

Earlier this month and previously in October, President Bush vetoed the attempts to expand the program saying that a favorable decision would move the country’s health care system in the wrong direction.

According to Bush, he couldn’t have possibly voted for bills such full of flaws, and that both of them were “essentially identical”, so the last month bill couldn’t have gotten a better answer. In a public statement, Bush said the bill had: “the same problems as the flawed bill I previously vetoed. I must veto this legislation too.”

The health program is to cover around 6.6 million poor children until March 2009, but the two previous bills would have extended the program to 10 million children coming from families with low and moderate incomes.

The initial plan was to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion in the next five years, but president Bush only agreed for $5 billion, motivating his decision by saying that the two rejected bills would have only encouraged low income families to leave the private system for the federally-funded state one.

The Democrats also proposed raising tobacco taxes for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, also known as SCHIP, but Bush objected to that as well. In his radio address, Bush said he was planning on keeping tax level low, as he promised last year.

"My resolution for the New Year is this: to work with Congress to keep our economy growing, to keep your tax burden low, and to ensure that the money you send to Washington is spent wisely - or not at all," said President Bush.