In one of its first actions of the new year, The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by a 289-139 margin. Last year, Congress passed the same legislation by narrower margins that could not surmount a veto by President George W. Bush.

The popular program provides federal matching money to the states to provide subsidized health insurance for 7 million youngsters, mostly from working poor and lower-middle-class families. The $32.3 billion expansion of SCHIP will allow coverage for 4 million more children, and would be funded by a 61 cent increase of the federal tax for a pack of cigarettes.

With President Barack Obama a strong supporter and bipartisan Senate support precluding the possibility of a filibuster, many GOP members of Congress who had previously opposed the program joined the majority. Among them were Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Alaska’s Don Young, all of whom faced tough re-election campaigns against Democrats who used their SCHIP opposition as an issue. Their near-death election experiences apparently provoked a legislative conversion.

No such rethinking of previous partisan positions was evident in the Texas delegation, where 20 Republicans voted against the SCHIP bill. The state leads the nation in percentage of uninsured children, with Harris County having the largest rate of unprotected youngsters.

That’s why the continuing opposition of Houston-region GOP representatives John Culberson, Pete Olson, Kevin Brady, Michael McCaul, Ted Poe and Ron Paul is so unfathomable. The Southeast Texas medical safety net is already stretched to breaking by the burden of treating uninsured patients in overcrowded hospital emergency rooms and absorbing the costs of their care.

In opposing SCHIP on the grounds it is socialized medicine, too costly and subsidizes illegal alien health care, the lawmakers are ignoring this fact: Taxpayers already bear the cost of treatment for the uninsured. Every child covered by the state-supplied private policies is one less expense for area health care providers, who otherwise pass the cost of indigent care on to insured patients.

The measure passed by the House will eliminate a five-year waiting period before legal immigrants become eligible for coverage under Medicaid and SCHIP. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, says claims that the program will cover illegal aliens are bogus. “These are not illegal immigrants,” said Green. “They are children who go to school, go to day care with our children, our grandchildren.”

Young Texans are the state’s future workers, taxpayers and leaders. They need every opportunity to lead healthy, productive lives, and one of the surest guarantees that a child will successfully grow to adulthood is good medical care. In opposing SCHIP expansion, lawmakers are putting their ideology above the interests of their constituents.