Dade Democratic congressional candidates stress healthcare

The issue of how best to provide low cost healthcare to Florida's poor children became an issue in three contested South Florida congressional seats.

BY LUISA YANEZ, Miami Herald

Tue, Apr. 22, 2008

Providing affordable healthcare to uninsured children in Florida became fodder in three local congressional races Monday -- as the Democratic challengers vowed to back the expansion of a national program.

Speaking at a healthcare forum at Hialeah Hospital, Democratic challengers Raul Martinez, Joe Garcia and Annette Taddeo said they would support raising the number of children eligible to enter SCHIP -- the State Children's Health-Insurance Program -- from the current 6 million to 10 million nationwide.

Across the country, there are 47 million uninsured people, including children. In Florida, 560,000 of the 3.7 million uninsured are children.

In September, children's advocates pressed U.S. Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, all South Florida Republicans, to vote to almost double the number of children in the SCHIP with an additional $35 billion. But the incumbents countered that the program was too broad and failed to ensure that the poorest children would get care while imposing a huge tax increase on cigar manufacturers, many of them small Cuban-American-owned businesses.

POPULAR PROGRAM

SCHIP is a popular program that fills a gap by offering medical coverage for children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance.

The bipartisan bill to expand it died in October when President Bush vetoed it.

''Our representatives turned a blind eye to their constituency to follow the party line,'' said Garcia, who is running against Mario Diaz-Balart in District 25.

Martinez, who is challenging Lincoln Diaz-Balart in District 21, added: ''We cannot have the greatest country in the world without having healthcare for our children,'' the former Hialeah mayor said.

Taddeo, who said the defeat of the SCHIP expansion was one of the reasons she decided to run against Ros-Lehtinen, made a personal revelation.

''I know what it's like to be a sickly child,'' said Taddeo, a businesswoman who is running in District 18. ``I was born with a cleft lip.''

Taddeo said her parents were lucky; they had insurance to pay for the 19 surgeries she underwent.

In town to support Taddeo and the two other Democratic challengers was U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, who led the failed push in October to expand SCHIP.

Hoyer called it 'unexplainable that the three Republican incumbents from South Florida voted `no.' ''

REPUBLICANS RESPOND

Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart said their opponents are misrepresenting their stance on SCHIP, which they support in principle.

They said the challengers fail to mention that SCHIP was extended in December until March 2009 with an additional $2 billion. All three Republicans voted for the pared-down increase.

Mario Diaz-Balart said the first SCHIP proposal was an inflated program that could have caused a jump in medical insurance costs for all Americans because an estimated two million children who now have insurance would have qualified for the government program. Also, the original proposal called for a 6,000 percent tax on the cigar industry. That would have thrown a heavy financial burden on cigar manufacturers in Little Havana and Tampa's Ybor City.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart said he would have backed the full expansion if the program did not deny service to children of legal immigrants or pregnant mothers and would have given the neediest children priority. ''They refused to accept my legislation filed as an amendment to the bill,'' he said.

Ros-Lehtinen said she, too, backs SCHIP, but ``the program should be enhanced so that it can serve poor children first.''