At this point in his embattled presidency, it's amazing that George W. Bush could spare the courage necessary to veto the excessive SCHIP reauthorization bill -- and to weather the predictable personal savaging that followed.

The "uncaring conservative" narrative (tiresome and utterly shattered by research, but still entrenched) was what congressional Democrats intended to invoke, and vulnerable Republicans hoped to dodge, when they crafted the outrageously bloated bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program: Who but a heartless wretch could vote against health care for poor kids?

Discussion of this issue has been discouragingly devoid of facts. Even a supposedly nonpartisan "political fact-check" from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center castigates the president for saying the program was for "poor children" and completely misses (or purposefully fudges) the reauthorization bill's hide-and-seek game on family incomes. The White House press release is more accurate and better sourced than this.

In fact, the effort to provide health insurance to low-income children has been bipartisan from the get-go.

A Republican Congress working with President Bill Clinton created SCHIP (called "CHIP" in each state, "SCHIP" by the feds) in 1997 to provide children's health insurance for families with household income up to twice the federal poverty line. The 10-year program was allocated nearly $40 billion.

Each state then had to launch its own CHIP to secure the feds' matching funds. In 1999, for instance, then-Gov. Bush worked with a Democratic-controlled legislature to create a Texas CHIP.

Since then eligibility standards have risen to 250 percent of the poverty line. That's $51,625 for a family of four -- well above the 2006 median household income of $48,200.

No doubt many people of good will would echo the words of the "Socialist Worker" in describing the program as "an indisputable success" for having reduced the number of children without health insurance from 22.3 percent in 1997 to 14.9 percent today.

Look again at that gap -- the 14.9 percent of eligible children yet to be reached. President Bush proposed a 20 percent increase in SCHIP funding -- $5 billion over five years -- enough to close the gap and then some.

But the House and Senate bills call for an eye-popping $35 billion expansion. One big reason for the excess is embedded in the Senate bill: It "grandfathers" legislation in New York and New Jersey that raise their states' CHIP eligibility levels to 400 and 350 percent, respectively, of the poverty level.

No other part of the SCHIP debate has been more contentious and less accurately reported than this. It has fired conservatives' charges that publicly funded health insurance would now be available to families earning as much as $83,000 a year (in New York) or $72,000 (in New Jersey).

Although in September the Department of Health and Human Services denied New York's request to expand to the 400 percent level, the Senate bill would honor it in the future -- obviously, as soon as a new, possibly Democratic administration could direct HHS to do so.

That's not the only budget buster in the SCHIP bill. It can claim to be a "$35 billion expansion" only because in its fifth year it covers scarcely one-third of the program's costs. After another huge appropriation, the 2007 bill's price would be well over $40 billion.

But the most unfair and illogical aspect of the SCHIP bill is its pretense of paying for itself by levying an additional 61 cents-per-pack tax on cigarettes.

Half of all smokers are in families earning less than 200 percent of the poverty line -- the very group SCHIP was originally intended to help -- so a tax on cigarettes would disproportionately hurt low-income families.

If the steep tax accelerates the current decline in the smoking rate, how will we fund SCHIP? By encouraging smoking? The conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report calculating that the nation would need 9 million new smokers by the end of this five-year reauthorization.

If we're going to make taxpayer-funded health insurance an entitlement for all children, even from families more than able to afford their own, then that's a national debate we need to have.

Ditto if we're proposing to pay for it by taxing the poor.

The only way to have that national debate was for the president to ignore critics whose goodwill he can never earn and veto the bill for a program he has always supported.

This late in his presidency he has nothing to lose, and the country has a lot to gain.