"Let them eat cake," Marie Antoinette reportedly said, when told that poor people were starving. Cake was not food but a euphemism for garbage. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, poor children can eat cake. A health insurance program was intended to provide this benefit for poor folk, but the administration for some reason is making it harder for middle-income children to get the insurance. Why are they doing this? Maybe because middle-income children are not officially classified as "poor." But the government's definition of "poor" is too narrow, and middle-income children are also poor as we understand the term, particularly when it comes to health insurance, which costs a fortune.

August 21, 2007 Rules May Limit Health Program Aiding Children New York Times By ROBERT PEAR

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a monthlong Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were intended to return the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.

“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

Stan Rosenstein, the Medicaid director in California, said the new policy was “highly restrictive, much more restrictive than what we want to do.”