A recent report by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee revealed a combined $521 million in benefits for veterans, and from the Defense Department benefits for veterans in 2010 was received by 20 for-profit schools.

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee

For-profit institutions are required to follow the 90/10 rule. That is, only 90 percent of their revenue may come from federal aid. If the formula used for determining the 90 percent included benefits for members of the military, many of these colleges would not pass.

This information has been helping to fuel efforts led by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and U.S. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) to increase scrutiny on for-profit colleges.

“[T]hey are really going after the military in a big way,” Harkin told The Iowa Independent, believing it is because it does not count towards the 90/10 law.

Further fueling the nearly year-long investigation through the HELP Committee, which Harkin leads, is questionable recruiting and retaining efforts that have been uncovered.

Harkin said private non-profit colleges in Iowa, such as Buena Vista University, Simpson College, Graceland College and the like are still doing a good job of educating low-income students; perhaps even better than the Regents, because of the endowments they receive. But his attention toward the for-profit private colleges has raised a number red flags.

“The federal government is putting out half a billion dollars a year in educational assistance for veterans and for active duty personnel,” Harkin further told The Iowa Independent. “When I inquired from the Department of Defense as to where it was going, what was happening to these military people — Were they graduating? Were they getting diplomas? Were they getting jobs? — I got nothing back. The Department of Defense has no data on that. They simply send the money to them and that’s it.”

A Government Accountability Office report concluded along with the investigation Harkin led that the Defense Department and the for-profit industry lacked sufficient scrutiny over where tax dollars were going and how they were being used.

Carper told the Chronicle on Higher Education he was surprised to learn military aid was not included in the 90/10 rule, and suggested the government should consider adjusting that.

“I’m a big advocate of skin in the game,” he said. “There has to be skin in the game for markets to work.”

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee

For-profits have not been alone in courting members of the military. Nonprofit and public colleges have as well. A 2009 Iowa task force found adding 100 veterans a year would yield an additional $800,000 in tuition income annually for the University of Iowa and nearly $2 million in revenue for the city of Iowa City.

For-profit schools have become the fastest growing sector of higher education, moving from 550,000 students in 1998 to more than 1.8 million students by 2008. Although they are still only 10 percent of the total higher education student population in the U.S., they take 42 percent of all Pell Grants.

Deceptive Recruitment Practices

With little oversight by the government as to where the education benefits for veterans are going or being used, for-profit colleges have stepped up their recruitment of members of the military.

In one instance a veteran was repeatedly told by recruiters that his post-9/11 GI Bill benefits would completely cover the cost of his degree. It was only after enrollment, the veteran said, that he learned he would owe approximately $11,000 beyond his military benefits to Bridgepoint-owned Ashford University.

This veteran, or veterans overall, were not the only students to file formal complaints against Ashford. The complaints came from students of different backgrounds — more than 700 in a two-and-a-half year period. They accused school officials not only lying to them or misleading them, but of charging them with undisclosed fees.

One student claimed he was told he would be able to receive his teaching license from Ashford, based in Arizona. Yet a year later, right before his scheduled graduation, he learned Ashford was not allowed by the state of Iowa to award teacher licenses, and that he would have to attend a “cooperating school” in Arizona for a year. In the complaint he stated, “I was really blown away to find out that I had spent so much time and money at a college that I was not going to be able to obtain my teacher’s license from.”

A number of students also reported receiving very little help once inside for-profit institutions, insisting there was more emphasis on recruiting rather than assisting students’ classwork. Indeed, some documents detailed instructions for officials to make at least 50 outbound calls a week in recruiting efforts and hold meetings almost daily with prospective students.

In undercover audio recordings by GAO agents, counselors at the for-profit schools can be heard discrediting traditional universities for large class sizes, insisting they would not be receiving a value education. While there are lecture courses with sometimes more than 300 students in a class, most classes taken at Iowa’s public universities throughout a degree program have less than 50 students in them. They also go on to tell potential students they would have to try to get less than a B in their classes at the for-profit college.

The GAO encountered some schools encouraging prospective students to falsify documents in order to receive more aid.

Perhaps the most alarming tactic found within internal documents recently released was the use of the “Pain Funnel.”

Lines within the documents from the for-profit ITT Technical Institute, which has more than 100 campuses nationwide, include “Remind them of what things will be like if they don’t continue forward and earn their degrees” and “Poke the pain a bit and remind them who else is depending on them and their commitment to a better future.”

Drop Out Rates

Colorado Tech University’s online program has a 61 percent drop-out rate. The University of Phoenix’s Axia College has seen 84 percent of their students drop out.

Jason Deatherage, former admissions adviser at Colorado Tech, was fired for not meeting his quota of recruiting military vets. He told the New York Times there is massive pressure to enroll more veterans.

“We knew that most of them would drop out after the first session,”  Deatherage said. “Instead of helping people, too often I felt like we were almost tricking them.”

Bridgepont Education had a 63 percent drop-out rate in 2009. Despite such a high rate of drop-outs, that year Bridgepont’s Chief Executive Andrew S. Clark earned almost twice as much as Charles Edelstein, CEO of the University of Phoenix, when he raked in $20.5 million.

Provided by the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee 

Student Debt Load and Career Barriers

Although, 11 of 16 community colleges in Iowa report graduation rates comparable to or worse than Bridgeport, students at for-profit institutions are almost twice as likely to default on their student loans.

Katie Bushnell currently attends Full Sail University, a for-profit school focused on the entertainment business. Bushnell takes classes online and expects to graduate within a year with a Bachelor’s degree and nearly $70,000 in student loan debt.

According to recent data released by the U.S. Department of Education, 13.8 percent of students who began repaying their public-private partnership loans in 2008 have since defaulted. For-profit institutions, however, reported 25 percent of their graduates defaulting after three years. There has been increased scrutiny over for-profit colleges as they enroll less than a fifth of all students but produce nearly half of all loan defaulters.

Bushnell actually walked away from traditional schools before coming to Full Sail. She started at Iowa State University, then attended Des Moines Area Community College and Indian Hills Community College. Much of her collegiate experience has been financed through student loans; however, she’s been working full-time hours to afford housing and living expenses since her family cannot contribute.

She counters the complaints students have lodged at other for-profits about not receiving support while taking classes.

“Full Sail does have excellent career services that has been helping me with resumes and career building exercises,” Bushnell said.

But Bushnell is worried about what she might end up doing after college since the entertainment business in Iowa is so small. She wanted to do music promotions, but with limited opportunities, she’s now considering out-of-state sports teams. Taking classes online, combined with trying to find work and build experience booking concerts during college has also placed obstacles in her way.

“I do miss having a set class time, because it is very difficult to focus and very easy to procrastinate with online classes,” Bushnell said. “Working full time and then coming home to classes is tough chore. I am envious of students who don’t have to work full time and still get by while in school.”

Watching tuition increases and budget cuts to public universities though is a big incentive for Bushnell to avoid going back to public colleges.

Contributions and Oversight

Part of Harkin’s investigation found 95 to 98 percent of students attending for-profit colleges borrowed money to attend. Since the average cost of a credit hour was often more than double that of tuition for a public college, the debt loads were significantly higher. Iowa has ranked in the top five for highest average student debt load by the Project on Student Debt every year that they’ve compiled data, ahead of all other Midwestern states.

With all of these reported problems, Harkin is seeking better oversight of the half a billion taxpayer dollars going to the for-profit colleges through military members’ benefits.

The Department of Education has already brought forward a new plan that would deny for-profits from receiving federal student aid if their graduates cannot pay off their student debt in a reasonable time frame.

While Harkin has been leading this charge, he has also been among the recipients of donations from the industry. As The Iowa Independent reported in 2010, he took significant donations from DeVry, Inc. and Bridgepoint. Democratic U.S. Reps from Iowa, Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack, also took contributions, as did U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was one of the biggest benefactors in contributions from the industry, receiving more than $30,000.

DeVry, based in Illinois, spent more than $300,000 on lobbying efforts in 2009 and 2010. Ten of the industry’s top companies collectively upped their spending on lobbying from $1.5 million in 2009 to more than $4 million in the first nine months of 2010. The industry is fighting against any new regulations.

“We need better oversight, and we need to bring this to light,” Harkin said. “I’ve had this ongoing investigation and it seems things keep getting worse and worse.”

The Education Department held back on imposing their new plan for regulations after facing heavy push-back from lobbying and opposition in Congress.

Wall Street money manager Steven Eisman testified before the HELP Committee last summer and called for-profit colleges “marketing machines masquerading as universities.” Eisman has hedged bets on some of these education corporations, but warned the committee the industry was reaping those rewards while taxpayers were at risk, as the companies are running on federal aid.

Harkin said Attorneys Generals around the country, including Florida, Illinois, Kentucky and Iowa’s Tom Miller, have launched investigations into the schools for any unlawful conduct. California and Maryland’s legislatures are pushing through bills to reduce or eliminate state aid to the for-profit colleges.

“[This report] is long overdue,” said Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser and chairwoman of the White House Council on Women and Girls. “We understand that the success of women and girls is vital to winning the future.”

The report, titled Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being (PDF), is a collaborative effort of several federal departments prepared for the White House Council on Women and Girls. None of the data revealed in the report is new — and the most recently reported statistics are from 2009 or 2006 — but it is the first time such a report has been drafted since President John F. Kennedy commissioned one in 1963.

A lot of the information in the report is old news — for instance, women are still trailing men in economic earnings: At all education levels women earned 75 percent of what men make in 2009. But the report does add some interesting perspectives. For example, the jobs that women tend to go for and the majors they take in college, tend to be in humanities or social work, something Obama is hoping to change. Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank said in a phone conference Tuesday that the president will be encouraging young women to pursue the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Women currently make up 51 percent of the population; there are about 4 million more females than males in this country. And 57 percent of Americans over 65 are women. But though women still exceed men in life expectancy, they are likely to face more health problems and physical ailments down the road, particularly in the regions of mobility, obesity and depression; though figures point to a higher prevalence of heart disease and diabetes in men (14 percent of men 18 and older, compared with 10 percent of women).

About a quarter of women have reported arthritis and hypertension, with those figures increasing as women become seniors. And though less-educated women have reported higher rates of hypertension than more-educated women, among men, hypertension is not associated with education levels.

The report finds that women exercise less than men. Only about 41 percent of 25-year-old women said they participated in the federally recommended amount of aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercises, compared with more than half of 25-year-old men. And of all women, only 15 percent reported exercising the recommended amount. In 2009, about 25 percent of women said they ate fruits and vegetables five or more times a day. Almost one out of seven adult women smoked cigarettes every day.

Amid all the statistical figures one statement really stands out in summarizing women’s health:

“Women are almost 40 percent more likely than men to report difficulty walking.”

And that’s difficulty walking a quarter of a mile, or three city blocks. Walking trouble can point to arthritis, heart disease, pulmonary conditions, neurological conditions, near-blindness and other sensory limitations, and can “affect an individual’s ability to fully take part in all aspects of life,” according to the report.

And then, of course, there are different levels of walking difficulty among women, depending upon education and race:

• Women who did not complete high school (23 percent) were twice as likely to report difficulty walking than women who have had at least some college (11 percent).
• Non-Hispanic black women (18 percent) were more likely to report difficulty walking than Non-Hispanic white women (12 percent) and Hispanic women (11 percent).

From 'Women in America,' source National Center for Health Statistics

And even if the information is already out there, here are some, perhaps, surprising findings:

• In any two-week period, 8 percent of women and girls report experiencing clinically significant depression, compared with 5 percent for men and boys.
• Women make up two-thirds of graduates in the fields of humanities, arts, education, health and welfare but one-quarter of the graduates in science and technology.
• During the most recent recession, the unemployment rate among women over 20 rose from 4.4 percent to 7.7 percent; for men the unemployment rose from 4.4 to 9.9 percent.
• About 7 percent of women are severely obese. But 14 percent of non-Hispanic black women are obese, compared with 7 percent of Hispanics and 6 percent of white women.
• In 2008, intimate partners were responsible for 26 percent of all violence against women, compared with 5 percent of all violence against men. Of all Americans killed by an intimate partner, 70 percent were female, a percentage unchanged since 1993.
• The rate of rape against females over 12 (as defined by the National Crime Victimization Survey, which notes that between 2004 and 2008, police were not notified of nearly half of all rapes) declined by 60 percent between 1993 and 2000 and has remained at this level throughout the past decade.
• While male students are more likely to be victimized with weapons, female students are twice as likely to be electronically bullied as males.
• The number of women committing crimes is growing: Women made up 18 percent of all arrestees for violent felony offenses in 2008, up from 11 percent in 1990. The amount of women arrested for burglary or larceny grew from 25 to 35 percent.
• About 206,000 adult women were incarcerated in state or federal prisons or local jails in 2008.
• The number of women under community supervision or parole increased by 121 percent between 1990 and 2008: 1.1 million adult women were under community supervision on probation or parole in 2008.
• Homicide victims among black women dropped from 2,300 in 1993 to 1,200 in 2008. But for white women the figure remained steady during this same period of time at 2,200.

Officials stressed the point of the report is to draw a complete story of the American Woman, piecing everything we know about her to improve her well-being.

So what will the Obama administration be doing with this data? Should Americans expect to see new legislation, or at the very least, more discussion of women’s issues after Women’s History Month has turned into National Poetry Month?

Asked directly, Jarrett said: “[This report] will be a tool to help inform our policies and programs. Given the financial challenges, it is important we help spend our money wisely. … This report gives data that will help support that.”

As evidence to the president’s commitment to improving the “quality of life for women and girls,” Jarrett pointed out that Obama created the White House Council on Women and Girls. And look, they got a report — which Jarrett said the administration plans to help them “do more with less.”

What that means exactly remains to be seen, but Preeta Bansal, general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, was slightly less vague. She said Obama has made a vow to enact policies that are evidenced-based, and the same goes for this information on women. She said he will be looking at how well existing programs targeted at women — in the areas of health, education, unemployment, and violence — are working.

If the bill passes the Senate, all abortion providers in the state could be sued if they knowingly perform abortions requested because of the unborn baby’s presumed gender or race. Abortion providers would now be compelled to sign an affidavit swearing they have no knowledge that the child is being aborted because of its sex or race.

The bill, authored by Rep. Steve Montenegro (R-Litchfield Park), was pegged by sponsors as a move to help end discrimination against unborn children, essentially implying that such discrimination is happening in the state, though opponents and supporters argued over the validity of that idea during Monday’s House debate. Regardless, it passed overwhelmingly, 41 to 18.

The legislation implicates the abortion provider and the woman: “A person cannot perform an abortion knowing that the abortion is sought based on sex or race of the child or the race of one of the parents,” reads the bill.

Other rules:

A person shall not knowingly or intentionally:

• Use force or the threat of force to intentionally injure or intimidate any person for the purpose of coercing a sex-selection or race-selected abortion.
• Solicit or accept monies to finance a sex selection or race selection abortion.

The bill also grants the right to the father or grandparents of the unborn child to sue the mother if it is proven she had an abortion because of gender- or race-based reasons. Potential violators of this law also include: physicians, physicians’ assistants, nurses, counselors or other medical or mental health professionals who do not report violations of this law; they could be fined up to $10,000.

But oddly, there’s no language that specifically implicates a father, who could potentially be involved in the decision, or the pregnant woman’s parents.

The title of the legislation is the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011, which, according to the Cronkite News Service, stems from a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) that never made it out of committee. According to the news service, last year Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law a Montenegro-sponsored bill increasing the amount of information hospitals and clinics must report about women who get abortions, along with a bill mandating a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions. Illinois and Pennsylvania have laws prohibiting sex-selection abortions, and Georgia, Mississippi, New Jersey, Idaho and Oklahoma have tried to enact similar legislation.

Another proposed anti-choice bill that’s scaring abortion-rights supporters across the state did not pass during Monday’s session but was instead delayed by the House Committee of the Whole. This abortion bill, House Bill 2416, repeals and revises several of Arizona’s current abortion laws, including a new ban on medication abortions and a mandate that abortion providers must conduct an ultrasound to give the woman an opportunity to see an image of her unborn fetus and listen to a heartbeat if one is present.

The conservative nonprofit Center for Arizona Policy has strongly endorsed the bill, stating: “Arizona has an important interest in protecting the health and safety of women and ensuring that women receive full and accurate information when considering abortion.” The group claims to have helped 84 bills turn into law.

On its website: “Our work has strengthened marriage, promoted the sanctity of life by limiting abortion and stopping attempts to bring physician-assisted suicide to our state, protected our community from gambling and pornography, allowed Bible clubs to be formed in middle schools, and expanded educational choice.”

UPDATE, 5:37 p.m.:

Michelle Steinberg, a policy manager for Planned Parenthood Arizona, told The American Independent that it is against Planned Parenthood procedure to ask a woman her reason for having an abortion, and, as far as she’s aware, women usually don’t divulge that information.

“We’re there to provide a legal medical procedure,” Steinberg said. “[The Arizona lawmakers] are creating this impression that women are deciding to end their pregnancies on the basis of race and gender, and it’s just not true. … This is one more way to deny access to reproductive health care.”

She said she is confident the legislation will pass into law and that it could potentially dissuade physicians from offering abortion services if they fear legal consequences or having their medical licenses revoked.

Steinberg noted that in the six years she’s worked for Planned Parenthood, Arizona lawmakers have enforced more and more regulations, particularly after former Gov. Janet Napolitano’s term. She said the decisions have become increasingly ideological and less and less based on logic and scientific reasoning.

“They’ll regulate [abortion] out of existence. They can’t outright ban it, so they’ll chip away at it until it’s impossible to get one.”

BP announced Monday it is planning to set aside $52 million for to improve the mental health of Gulf coast residents. But mental health professionals are already saying that that may not be enough — an indication of just how dire the situation may be in the region.

According to the the Sun Herald, in Mississippi:

The sum is considerably less than Mississippi asked for, said John Hosey with the Mississippi Interfaith Disaster Task Force, which serves vulnerable populations such as the Vietnamese community. Hosey said he heard Louisiana and Alabama also had asked for more than they are slated to receive.

As I wrote yesterday, based on some excellent reporting in Grist and elsewhere, local residents in La Gloria, Mexico, where the swine flu outbreak may have originated, suspect that the source is the Granjas Carroll industrial pig farm. The facility is half-owned by U.S.-based Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor.

Although some 60 percent of the town was sick with some sort of flu recently, it’s not clear that it was swine flu and Smithfield denies that any of its hundreds of thousands of pigs were infected. Smithfield subsidiaries “routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza,” the company said in a statement.

However, the current swine flu outbreak appears to involve a new strain of H1N1 influenza, so vaccinations against earlier forms of the virus may not work against this one.

The Mexican pig industry, meanwhile, denies all responsibility.

“We deny completely that the influenza virus affecting Mexico originated in pigs, because it has been scientifically demonstrated that this is not possible,” said a statement issued by the National Organization of Pig Production and Producers and its president, Mario Humberto Quintanilla González.

But the industry’s insistence that the disease cannot be transmitted from pigs to people contradicts almost everything the Mexican government has been saying about it, reports David Kirby for The Huffington Post. Mexico’s Health Minister, Jose Angel Cordova, has said the virus, “mutated from pigs, and then at some point was transmitted to humans.”

Fortunately, U.N. health inspectors don’t seem to be taking anyone’s word for it and will conduct their own investigation.

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“There is no connection between the severity of a pandemic and border crossings,” Osterholm said Tuesday during an interview on Public Radio International’s “The World.” What’s more, closing the border could actually inhibit the United States’ ability to obtain what it needs to treat patients and stop the swine flu’s spread. “Few people realize how many of the medical products we use in this country are made outside of the country,” Osterholm said.

These products include the circuits for mechanical ventilators that help people breathe in a severe case of the flu. “One of largest producers of circuits in the world is in Mexico,” said Osterholm. “So if we suddenly shut down the border we’d limit how many ventilators we could provide.”

So despite the hysteria in the United States and in Europe — where the European Union health minister just issued an advisory against travel to the United States and Mexico — Osterholm says: “Border closings in and of themselves do not accomplish walling yourself off from that virus.”

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Influence comes in many forms. Often, influencing the influencers is a smart strategy. Free food never hurts, either.

The head of public relations for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer makes free food a centerpiece of his “tips for managing journalists” an industry conference, Advertising Age reports.

In this video clip, Pfizer’s global public relations chief Ray Kerins explains his strategy for working with journalists, whose coverage, in the words of Advertising Age,”so heavily impacts the pharmaceutical giant’s reputation.” Kerins says:

“…[T]omorrow, we’re hosting a lunch with the communications team for Linda Johnson, who’s one of the top health care folks at the Associated Press. She’s outstanding, she’s brilliant we love her to death. But we’re bringing her into our home and we’re saying, look, here’s who we are and here’s what we’re talking about. She’s not meeting with executives, she’s meeting with communications, with my folks on the media team. We do this about every other week.”

Johnson won’t be the first journalist to be feted at Pfizer. Kerins estimates that his team met with about 115 journalists in 2008, on and off-site.

No doubt it’s a good investment for Pfizer. Critical media coverage can cost a drug company billions in lost sales, diminished good will, and even legal and political scrutiny. Stories with headlines like “Maker of Vioxx Accused of Deception” hurt Merck’s bottom line.

Kerins claims that that his team has “no agenda” when journalists are made honored guests at corporate headquarters. But, as someone who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, writing ad copy for various well-known brands including some of Pfizer’s products, I can categorically say “Yeah, right.” He may not be pitching specific stories, but he’s almost certainly mounting a charm offensive.

The pharmaceutical industry is perhaps second only to Hollywood in the economic emphasis placed on lunch. A couple advertising agencies where I worked did a brisk business designing customized boxes for bagels served at so-called “Lunch and Learns”–promotional events where company representatives, or scientists hand-picked by the company, tried to woo doctors into prescribing the latest ACE inhibitor or antidepressant. We’d get memos from the marketing teams explaining how our colorful bagel boxes, emblazoned with company logos and drug tag lines, reinforced the key sales messages of the lecture.

When big pharma reaches out to influencers, such as doctors and journalists, its always couched in terms of education — but Merck is not an educational institution. It sells drugs.

Ironically, a lot of the worst press big pharma has gotten in recent years centered on the companies’ shameless attempts to ingratiate themselves with physicians through free food, conveniently-packaged information, and flattery. Apparently, Pfizer has decided that the cure for bad press is to offer journalists similar perks.

This afternoon, House Dems announced that they’d cut a provision from their version of the stimulus bill that would have made it easier for states to cover family planning services for low-income women, Elana Schor of TPMDC reports:

House Democrats have removed a provision from their stimulus bill that would exempt states from the need to get waivers for covering family planning under Medicaid. The family-planning aid has been the subject of repeated Republican attacks over the past few days, and health care advocates were dismayed by the Democrats’ decision to give in on its removal.

“We are disappointed that the Medicaid Family Planning State Option, a common-sense provision to expand basic health care to millions of women, including many who have lost their jobs in the current economic downturn, was a victim of misleading attacks and partisan politics, and dropped from the economic stimulus bill,” Planned Parenthood for America President Cecile Richards said in a statement today.

Obama wanted the birth control provision cut because he saw it as an obstacle to the bipartisan support he is seeking for the economic stimulus package. This decision is sure to upset his supporters in the women’s health movement, whose leaders lobbied forcefully for the birth control provision.

The tobacco industry is fighting a lonely battle against health insurance for poor kids.

A coalition of tobacco industry groups ran a full-page ad in the influential Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, on Monday warning President-elect Barack Obama that a proposed tobacco tax hike to cover the expansion of the popular State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) would be an “economic disaster.”

The ad is sponsored by the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO), the American Wholesalers and Manufacturers Association (AWMA), and the Southern Association of Wholesale Distributors (SAWD), which claim, jointly, to represent the employees of tobacco sellers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. [To view full-sized ad, click on thumbnail, above.]

Congressional Democrats hope to score an early victory by passing an SCHIP expansion. The bill is expected to face vote in the House and a markup in the Senate Finance Committee this week. The legislation will reauthorize the program before it expires on March 31.

The expansion of the SCHIP rolls would be funded with a tobacco tax hike. The size of the proposed increase hasn’t been officially announced, but an earlier version of the bill vetoed by president Bush in 2007 would have added 61 cents to the price of a package of cigarettes–an extra $222.65 per year for a pack-a-day smoker.

The ad in Roll Call asserts, without supporting evidence, that the tobacco tax would cause “economic and employment devastation” by putting more than 117,000 tobacco industry workers, such as convenience store clerks, warehouse workers, and tobacco farmers out of work.

However, a $35 billion expansion program to cover an additional 4 million people could create at least that many new jobs, if the money were spent on expanding public programs like Medicaid, according, at least, to one advocate for expanding SCHIP.

“If the bulk of that spending were going into Medicaid, I can imagine that something on that order jobs could result.” said Michael Lighty, Director of Public Policy for the California Nurses Association.

The greatest job growth from an SCHIP expansion would be expected in those states that put the money directly into private programs like Medicaid, as opposed to private health insurance programs, Lighty explained.

Opponents of the tax increase, like Big Tobacco, argue that increasing cigarette taxes burdens the poor disproportionately because lower income people are more likely to smoke. However, by the same token, lower income Americans will disproportionately benefit from both reduced tobacco consumption and expanded health insurance coverage for poor children. Plans vary, but private health insurance for one child typically costs more than $223 per year. So, even families with smoking parents could easily come out ahead if they get healthcare for their kids, despite paying more per pack of cigarettes, explains Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, a national consumer health organization that supports the plan to expand SCHIP with tobacco taxes.

SCHIP serves the children of America’s working poor–kids whose parents make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private health insurance. Currently, about 6 million children are covered by SCHIP. The proposed expansion would relax eligibility standards to cover an additional 4 million children, according to Pollack.

The proposed expansion is popular with Democratic legislators, unions, pharmaceutical and insurance trade groups, physicians, and the general public. Even some moderate Republicans support the plan. An earlier version of the legislation passed Congress in 2007 only to be vetoed by President Bush.

The rhetoric in the Roll Call ad suggests that the prospect of a Democratic president is making the tobacco industry very nervous. This time, when the SCHIP bill reaches the oval office, George Bush won’t be there to veto it.