"Heckuva job, Bushie."

Recent revelations about the Bush administration's role in New Orleans's rebuilding have included: **FEMA trailers are making residents sick from contaminated air
**Federally-funded housing reconstruction is moving at a snail's pace, with just a tiny number of new units completed.
**Thanks to bureaucratic barriers erected by the Bush administration, Louisiana and New Orleans are getting a fraction of what they need for reconstruction.

But the most appalling aspect came to light in a July 24 NY Times article on the absence of hospitals and doctors in New Orleans, which are absolutely essential to the city getting back on its feet. After all, who would live in a city where they literally could not get healthcare? Unfortunately, Bush and Co. see this as an opportunity to drive home a vital lesson: healthcare is best delivered through paying off private insurers as useless middlemen, instead of directly providing health services.

Much the same philosophy underlines Bush's opposition to the S-CHIP program to provide health coverage to uninsured children. The expansion of S-CHIP has the support of such hardline right-wingers as Sens. Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts, and Charles Grassley, but Bush is taking the extreme position that the S-CHIP program is part of a plot to establish single-payer healthcare in the US, according to a NY Times article July 8.

In New Orleans, at immediate issue is the rebuilding of Charity Hospital, constructed in 1939 as one of Gov. Huely Long's most important achievements. The state is willing to commit the needed funds, but Bush wants the money mainly funneled to private insurers, despite the obvious inefficiency. As the NY Times reported July 24,

"But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground. The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured."

So when it comes down to subsidizing private insurers or saving the poor of New Orleans and poor children across the nation, Bush's priorities are atrociously crystal-clear.