By Daniel Johnson-Kim, Sports Editor

Forget about pumpkins and scary movies, October is the month for taxes and children’s health insurance, at least in Washington D.C.

Recently Congress shifted its agenda from the stalemate debate on the Iraq war to the domestic hot topic of government funded healthcare. Specifically, Congress is considering the renewal and re-jiggering of a federally funded Children’s Health Insurance program. The congressional majority is calling for a $35 billion expansion to increase the amount of children covered by the State’s Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The program is primarily funded through “sin” taxes on tobacco and alcohol and has been a small success for children’s healthcare. In fact, before the proposed expansion, the SCHIP covered 6.6 million children from not only poor families but some modest-income families also.

But you can’t fool a fool; President Bush sees stalling the program as an effective way to cut government spending.

Bush claims the expansion is a sneaky attempt to increase the amount of people covered by governmentfunded healthcare and is a step away from the privatized industry thriving today. Bush vowed to veto the bill no matter how much congressional support it gets. He will not wiggle on this issue.

Before this summer all the political rhetoric about healthcare I just spat off would have meant nothing to me. I probably would have stopped reading after the second paragraph.

But after 10 hot and humid weeks working at Street Sense, a non-profit street paper in the District that covers homeless issues often ignored by the mainstream D.C. media, I finally care about healthcare.

In a small church office blocks away from the White House, I saw homeless men with college degrees pleading with insurance service operators for treatment approval for a number of diseases that have forced them to settle for life on the dichotomized streets of Washington D.C.

While I saw grown men struggle with something as simple as getting medication or seeing a dentist, I realized the current healthcare system leaves too many Americans uncovered.

Instead of valuing health and medicine by promoting a public healthcare agenda that lifts one another up, we have turned Americans’ health into a profit seeking industry. Rather than provide treatment, the privatized Health Maintenance Organizations that currently regulate the healthcare industry make more money by denying service than providing it.

So instead of taking a chance on a experimental cancer treatment, the HMO’s would rather save money by letting the cancer patient die.

Healthcare is a human right. It is not something to be used as a tool for making money off of death.

We have no problem with “socialized” education, but healthcare is not important enough to make a public agenda. The sooner we realize healthcare is a universal concept, the sooner my friends at Street Sense and 47 million other uninsured Americans can go to the doctor without the fear of a daunting medical bill.