George Will explains in his latest Newsweek column about the SCHIP debate.
Among the highlights of the bill supported primarily by congressional Democrats:
It would immediately include some with incomes 400 percent of the poverty line ($83,000 for a family of four). Over time, its “mission creep” would continue. Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, says that the new SCHIP would enroll 2.8 million more children, but 1.1 million of them would be from families for whom SCHIP had become an incentive to drop their private insurance. To that, some liberals say, sotto voce: Good.
Why? In the perennial tension between the competing values of freedom and equality, conservatives favor freedom, which inevitably increases unequal social outcomes. Liberals’ mission is the promotion of equality, understood as equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.
Liberals increasingly define the public good in terms of the multiplication of entitlements. Conservatives increasingly understand their mission as the promotion of attitudes and aptitudes they think are weakened by that multiplication.
