The debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip) — whether to continue it, and for how much money and how many kids — is providing a clear view into the ugliness of anti-government conservatism. Nobody contends that the program isn’t successfully providing much needed care to millions of children, or that providing the care via SCHIP is less expensive for the nation than having all of these uninsured children show up at emergency rooms when sick.

When CNN was picking the YouTube questions for the recent Democratic debate it passed on an excellent challenge from Michael Moore:

I am calling on each presidential candidate to pledge to refuse their free government health care until every person in this country also has it. I want every candidate who said they’d work for the minimum wage as president to work uninsured, too, until health care is universal. And I want the other candidates to join them. (Yes, I’m looking at you, too, Republicans. I know you can afford to do it.)

To be really effective it would have to be extended to the full Congress also. And  the Judiciary. Just end the free government-run healthcare they and their families are all receiving and let them experience the joys of the free market system they never tire of praising and pushing on the rest of us.

Between Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” and an election cycle in which the American people are naming healthcare as their number two issue (after the war in Iraq), American healthcare is about to undergo a long overdue and hopefully deep examination. If, however, all we do is focus on access to and payment for care — arguing, as Moore admirably does, for the elimination of private health insurance — then it is likely that the status quo will prevail, because the insurance companies will win that battle.

The insurance industry is a major contributor to and thus part-owner of the Congress. The men and women who make up the Senate and House are beholden to the industry for much of their financing yet, ironically enough, not for their own healthcare. Instead, all of the people who run the government (executive, legislative and judiciary) get their care through a government-run and -financed, single-payer, universal (for them) system.

We have to appreciate their conundrum when they get together to decide what to do about the rest of us — the fifty million who have no insurance at all, and many others who have the sort of tragically inadequate insurance that Moore highlights.

The only thing more depressing than listening to our political and pundit classes soundbite their ways around the subject of the war in Iraq without every addressing the core issue of America’s addiction to Middle Eastern oil, is listening to their plans to reform the American healthcare system. Blah, blah, yak, yak, nothing ever changes, and the core problem with healthcare in America is never mentioned:

And these health insurance companies are — they’re just — they’re the Halliburtons of the health industry. I mean, they really — they get away with murder. They charge whatever they want. There’s no government control. And frankly, we will not really fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies. I mean, they literally have to be eliminated. They cannot be allowed to exist in this country.