The Bush administration reached a deplorable, preordained verdict yesterday when it denied New York State permission to expand a valuable health insurance program to help cover middle-class children. The administration, which makes no effort to disguise its disdain for government insurance programs, imposed new, excessively stringent requirements last month that not only guaranteed New York's denial but will make it nearly impossible for any state to expand coverage.

The denial shows the White House at its most ideological and intransigent. Unfortunately, tens of thousands of children in New York — and many more nationally — will end up paying the price.

New York wanted to raise its income threshold for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, from the current $51,000 for a family of four to more than $82,000. There is room to debate whether that level — four times the poverty level — is too high, but the administration is not basing its rejection on those grounds. Federal officials say they have no authority to reject a state's plan based on income eligibility alone.

That is apparently why the administration cooked up new requirements that allow it to block middle-class coverage on other grounds. This is a distressing change for a program that had previously given states great leeway to devise coverage to fit their own circumstances.