CHIPs

In more innocent times CHIPs stood for the old Erik Estrada California Highway Patrol show. In most episodes, Officers Ponch & Jon (Larry Wilcox) would take up the cause of some unfortunate lost Southern California soul finding the victim a place to live, matching him or her with an estranged acquaintance, or getting medical/financial help to put the person's life back on the road to recovery. In our fast paced new millennium, CHIP now is the acronym for the federal Children's Health Insurance Program. For each year of the past decade the program has been doling about $5 billion to needy children for basic medical coverage. Now with the Dems in legislative power, a bill has been passed that would more than double the monies available to our nation's most important resource - our offspring. Our uninformed president has threatened to veto this vital program in the name of creeping socialism and financial constraints. What needs to be mentioned is that the yearly cost for the program will increase to about $12 billion while the annual price tag of the Iraqi quagmire in the next fiscal year will be about $108 billion. Who will be benefiting from such largesse? Haliburton, Blackwater, and all the other usual suspects. Hard to believe, but the original CHIPs guys, Ponch and Jon, carried a heart a lot larger than the one residing in the man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.