President Bush, are you smarter than a seventh-grader?

Apparently not. Graeme Frost of Baltimore is 12 years old, a seventh-grader at the Park School, and he understands why children need health care and their parents need help paying for it. He explained it during a rebuttal to the president's Saturday radio address. Yes, we know, Senate staffers wrote the speech for Graeme. That doesn't take away from the message. Does anyone really think President Bush writes his own material?

Anyway, Graeme and his 9-year-old sister Gemma were passengers in their family's SUV in December 2004 when it hit a patch of ice and smashed into a tree. Both were hospitalized. Graeme was in a coma for a week and still requires physical therapy.

Both of their parents work but their combined income of $45,000 isn't enough to pay their $1,200 a month mortgage, all of their other living expenses and health care for their four children. The care Graeme and Gemma received was through Maryland's CHIP program, which is available to families that earn less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

That's the cutoff for subsidized care in Pennsylvania, too, but it doesn't mean all those families get free health care for their children. Families of four with incomes under under $41,300 get free coverage under Medicaid or CHIP. Families with incomes up to $61,950 can be covered by paying from $38 to $60 per child per month. Those earning more can enroll for $150 a month per child. Not cheap, but still less than many private health insurance plans.

CHIP already covers 6.6 million children in the nation. In Pennsylvania, 147,392 children are covered under CHIP; in Allegheny County alone, there are 12,076 children covered.

This is a sound program that clearly is working, in Pennsylvania and across the nation. Congress voted to reauthorize the program for another five years, but President Bush has been steadfast in maintaining his intention to veto the measure. He's sticking to that position even though the U.S. House, which originally wanted to add $50 billion to the program, cut back to the same $35 billion sum passed in the Senate. That compromise removed objections that the Medicare Advantage program for senior citizens was going to be cut to pay for the expansion of CHIP.

It's not too late for the president to change his mind and answer Graeme's plea to, as he said, "help other kids be as lucky as me."