The SCHIP children’s health insurance program is fighting a Presidential veto. Governor Carcieri and the legislature are considering cutting health care for 18,000 poor children. In a really Darwinian situation you would think we would make children’s health a priority, but we hold to a different standard. Is it financial or political triage?

From the California Nurses Association…

“The patient’s history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat,� the ad states, referencing Cheney’s lengthy medical chart. “For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.�

The Republican slime is already spewing but the nurses are standing by their words.

Showing no signs of backing down from its controversial ads, a spokesman for the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee tells The Washington Post’s The Sleuth blog that it’s Cheney and the Bush administration who are outrageous:

“What’s outrageous is we have an administration that sits on its hands while we have 47 million people who are uninsured … This administration has ignored this health care crisis,” says Charles Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee. “They’re indifferent to pain and suffering.”

Today the federal reserve put more truckloads of funny money into the stock market, so that speculators won’t be falling out windows like in 1929. And as in the Great Depression, it will be the working people who are told to practice ‘austerity’. The people preaching it will never have to sit in a plastic chair in the emergency room at the Rhode Island Hospital, hoping they can get a chance to tell a doctor about their chest pain.

Let’s just admit that we have an American elite, and dream we’ll be good enough to join it. Or else pay close attention between now and November, to which candidate is willing to commit to accessible healthcare for all.