August 2, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

Marching toward HillaryCare

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve a troubling expansion of a federal health care benefit for children. And it’s all part of a plan crafted nearly 15 years ago to impose socialized medicine through the back door.

“The march toward HillaryCare,” writes Heritage Foundation Vice President Mike Franc, is well underway. But Heritage is there with the facts to draw attention to this looming socialism.

Take our poll: Should Congress create a new entitlement for health care that puts us on the road to socialized medicine?

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was originally designed to help low-income families pay for health care for their kids. But liberals—claiming the mantle of “helping the children”—want to expand SCHIP to cover more families—even those making enough to get hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax on high earners.

Heritage fellow Ernest Istook, a former member of Congress, explains what this debate is really about in a new Heritage video.

Read more about how this bill increases dependency and advances socialized medicine.

What next after amnesty?

After conservatives defeated liberal attempts to push amnesty legislation through Congress, there was good cause for celebration. But in the wake of this victory, we must remember that the problem of illegal immigration in America remains unsolved. Americans rightly want to know what’s next in the fight to secure the borders and reform the immigration system.

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) provided a common-sense answer: enforce the law.

Find out more about why amnesty isn’t the solution—and what reforms we can undertake to really secure the border.

—DeEtte Chatterton

Remembering Milton Friedman

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) joined Cato Institute President Ed Crane and Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner yesterday in Heritage’s Lehrman Auditorium for a celebration of what would have been Milton Friedman’s 95th birthday.

Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, and his work helped guide the conservative movement.

“Milton Friedman was small in stature but a giant in the world of ideas,” Heritage President Ed Feulner said last year to mark his passing. “His passion and wisdom extended well beyond the field of economics and combined to make him one of the most compelling advocates of human freedom the world has known.”

Feulner explained that his “ideas have empowered millions of people to pursue their destiny, opening for them new economic and educational opportunities that have made them more productive and more prosperous.”

Religion matters

Social science continues to suggest that traditional values are important. A new study of 20,000 children highlighted by Heritage’s FamilyFacts.org points out that parents’ religious attendance influences their children’s development.

In the study, reports the website, “children were less likely to exhibit behavioral problems at school if either of their parents (particularly their mothers) attended religious services and if both parents attended church with the same frequency, whether sporadically or frequently, than children whose parents did not attend religious services at all.”

In other news

• Britain’s government-run health care system continues to fail patients. One woman, 108 years old, has been told that the wait time for her new hearing aid is 18 months. Rationing of this sort is all but inevitable under socialized medicine.
• Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure while on vacation Monday. Fortunately, he has been released from the hospital after doctors gave him a clean bill of health.
• Rupert Murdoch has reached a deal to purchase Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $5.8 billion. Murdoch’s News Corp. owns Fox News, The New York Post and other major media companies.
• More than 1,000 economists have signed a letter to Congress urging them not to impose arduous new restrictions on commercial activity.
• A new report faults international commerce for the near extinction of the buffalo a century ago. The implication, of course, is that free enterprise is incompatible with conservation—which is hardly a fair conclusion.
• When local officials in Virginia asked for $900 million in federal outlays to fund a new commuter rail line, the Bush administration rightly raised questions about the project’s high—and ever-growing—price tag. But for its refusal to throw federal taxpayer money at this fundamentally local project, the Bush administration is now being accused of a “bias” against mass transit.
• Writing on National Review Online, Iain Murray points out that one bill now moving through Congress is longer even than the new Harry Potter novel, which weighs in at 759 pages.

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.

• On Wednesday, August 8 at 11:30 a.m., former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar will discuss how Estonia transitioned from communism to a modern free-market democracy.
• On Tuesday, August 14 at 11:00 a.m., author Rowan Scarborough talks about his new book, Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. DeEtte Chatterton contributed to this report.

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