The bill intended to expand healthcare for children in low-income families is expected to breeze through the Senate. The bill passed 289 to 139, with 40 Republicans in support.

The $32.3 billion cost of expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program for the next 4½ years will be paid for in part by raising taxes by 61 cents on a pack a cigarettes to 1$. The additional spending would provide government-sponsored coverage to 4 million uninsured children.

 

Obama hopes the Senate will adopt the measure with “the same sense of urgency so that it can be one of the first measures I sign into law when I am president.” “In this moment of crisis, ensuring that every child in America has access to affordable health care is not just good economic policy, but a moral obligation we hold as parents and citizens,” President-elect Barack Obama was quoted as saying.

 

On the other hand, Republican Study Committee chair Tom Price accused the Democrats of turning the program into “a political tool used to expand the federal bureaucracy and extend benefits to individuals who fall well outside of the bill's original intent.”

 

Barack Obama has promised major changes to U.S. health care, pledging to create a new national health plan, similar to Medicare, for the uninsured and small businesses. He has repeatedly told Americans that he was ready to take on the responsibility of changing the face of the health-care system. The plan is based on the idea of expanding government health care.

 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that nearly 83 percent of the 4.1 million uninsured children who would gain coverage after the implementation of the program are in families with income below eligibility limits. According to previous reports, the phenomenon of uninsured children is prevalent in families with middle income, with parents earning somewhere between $25,000 and $75,000 a year for a family of four. Other elements associated with uninsured children were parents with less than a high school education, Hispanic ethnicity, single-parent households, geographic residence in the south or west, and having a parent with private insurance coverage. A study published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that more than 1 million children had no coverage for the entire year, while 3 million children had some lack of coverage despite having one parent with full coverage.

 

Bush vetoed two similar bills in 2007, arguing the measure would bring tax increases and the expansion of government health care.

The new plan will be led by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, now Obama's secretary of health and human services. The House bill would provide health insurance to an additional 4.1 million children and parents, including legal immigrant children and pregnant women. Under the current law, they would have to wait five years before coming eligible for the program.