Stop Big Tobacco from hijacking SCHIP

If only we could pay top dollar for people to pose as grassroots supporters and inundate congressional offices with duplicitous calls and emails to earn votes. That’s what Big Tobacco is doing.

The tobacco and private insurance industries have been fighting hard to oppose full funding of SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) because they see it as a detriment to their bottom line. That's because the main funding sources on the table for children’s health coverage are increases in the tobacco tax and windfall payments to private insurers.

We can’t let kids' health care get hijacked by special interests and their bottom-line incentives. Tell your Senators and Representative to support full funding ($50 billion) for SCHIP legislation.

Contact Congress now by email or by calling 1-800-828-0498.

As the Senate Finance Committee gets closer to finalizing this legislation it is important that we keep up our momentum. Your previous efforts to contact Congress have been tremendous, and we can’t thank you enough for the support. But we can’t slow down now, when the other side is just gearing up.

President Bush is continuing his campaign against kids’ health coverage, calling SCHIP “government health care” and trying to make it a partisan issue by criticizing Democrats for trying to fully fund this incredibly successful program. Instead, he advocates wasting money on inefficient tax credits and giving more money to private health insurers. Let’s not let him get away with it.

By emailing and calling Congress, and telling your friends to do the same, we can keep SCHIP legislation from being derailed by special interests and the President’s privatization attempts.

.Act now to keep kid's health care on track

The greater our efforts are now, the more likely we’ll see a piece of legislation that speaks to the needs of millions of families and uninsured kids.

Let’s take the fate of children’s health care out of the hands of Big Tobacco and private insurers, and show Congress what a real grassroots movement looks like.

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Tony Garr, tgarr@thcc2.org, http://www.thcc2.org/

1103 Chapel Ave., Nashville, TN 37206

1-615-227-7500 • 1- 877- 431- 7083 • Fax 1-615-1946