[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 32 (Thursday, March 13, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1004-H1009]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 HEALTH CARE FOR OUR NATION'S CHILDREN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, once again, today I rise to draw the 
attention of my colleagues to the problem of so many children in our 
country who do not have health insurance, and I am very pleased that I 
am going to be joined today by the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. 
Hooley], who is here also to talk about the same issue because of her 
concern about the fact that this Congress so far has not addressed the 
issue.
  I have been talking over the last few weeks, and I guess a couple of 
months now, about various reports that have come out in various States; 
we had one in New York City, and we had another one in Massachusetts. 
We have had accounts in some of the Nation's major newspapers pointing 
to the problem of increasing numbers of children that do not have 
health insurance in this country.
  Well, yesterday the Children's Defense Fund, which is certainly one 
of the leading organizations that is an advocate for children, and 
particularly on the issue of health care for children, released its 
annual report on the state of America's children. And like so many 
other reports congressional Democrats have been talking about here on 
the House floor in recent weeks, the Children's Defense Fund report is 
full of

[[Page H1005]]

disturbing information about the number of children that lack health 
insurance.
  It is information, of course, that congressional Democrats have cited 
time and again in our ongoing effort to convince the Republicans that 
the issue of uninsured children is one of the most, if not the most 
important issue the 105th Congress should examine. I emphasize the word 
should, Mr. Speaker, because to date the Republicans have yet to 
incorporate a health insurance program for children into their agenda 
for Congress.
  Well, among the all too familiar information contained in the 
Children's Defense Fund report is the total number of uninsured 
children in this country: some 10 million American kids lack health 
coverage. Since 1989, the number of children without private health 
insurance has risen by an average of 1.2 million per year. I stress 
that: 1.2 million per year. Nearly 90 percent of uninsured children 
have at least one working parent, and 64 percent have a parent who 
works full time, so we are talking about working parents here. Every 
day that goes by without congressional action, 3,300 more kids are 
added to the ranks of the uninsured, a trend that has been exacerbated 
in recent years by the growing number of working parents who do not 
qualify for Medicaid but remain unable to afford insurance for their 
kids. As I said, these numbers continue to grow.
  I have to say, though, that we must be careful not to get too caught 
up in the practice of simply reading the numbers. I do that a lot, and 
I do not want to just emphasize that. The emphasis has to be placed on 
who exactly are the uninsured children, why they are uninsured, and 
what are the consequences. Perhaps if we can help our Republican 
colleagues understand the consequences, we will have greater success in 
convincing them that providing health insurance to children is of the 
utmost importance.
  I just wanted to talk a little about this CDF report. It does an 
excellent job of explaining what really is the issue here. Just a quote 
from the report. It says:

       The human costs of children's lack of health coverage are 
     high. Study after study have shown that children and adults 
     lacking health insurance are more likely to see doctors less 
     often, even when they are sick, or to go without preventive 
     care and to emergency rooms when they need treatment.
       Seven of 10 uninsured children live in families with 
     incomes below 200 percent of poverty. Many such families must 
     choose between paying the full cost of prescriptions and 
     doctor visits for uninsured children and paying for other 
     basic family needs like the rent, utility bills or whatever. 
     Care is sometimes delayed when children are sick, with 
     parents hoping that no harm results.

  Mr. Speaker, we are talking about families where one or both parents 
work. These hard-working parents, as the CDF report puts it, are 
playing by the rules, and more often than not their wishful thinking 
does not work.
  The report notes, and I just want to mention this quote, because I 
think it is really true, that the report notes that ``perhaps less 
obvious, quote, perhaps less obvious, but no less damaging are the 
educational, social and economic costs to the children who lack health 
insurance and to the Nation.''
  Children who are unnecessarily ill can miss days, weeks, or even 
months of school and their parents can miss significant periods of 
work. A child who cannot see the blackboard well and his parents cannot 
afford a visit to the eye doctor or eyeglasses cannot learn up to his 
or her potential. Uninsured pregnant women without adequate prenatal 
care are more likely to deliver babies with dangerously low birth 
weights, and the average hospital costs for a low-birth-weight baby are 
10 times the cost of prenatal care.
  Mr. Speaker, this is the yearbook that the Children's Defense Fund 
put out. It is called ``The State of America's Children,'' and I would 
suggest that every one of our colleagues take a look at this document.
  This afternoon, actually this morning, I had a number of physicians 
from my district that were down to visit me from the New Jersey Medical 
Society, and some of them were on a cable TV show that I had earlier 
this afternoon. I asked about the issue of preventative care, and one 
of the physicians was an eye doctor. He specifically pointed out how in 
the case of eye disease, prevention and being able to see an eye doctor 
and getting help when problems start is so crucial and really prevents 
serious eye disorders down the road.

                              {time}  1830

  Also, I would note how very inexpensive it was to deal with 
preventative care to make sure children were seeing a doctor, as 
opposed to having to go to a hospital or having a very expensive 
operation later.
  At some point during our special order, I would like to talk about 
some of the legislation that my Democratic colleagues have put forward 
to try to solve this problem, as well as the proposals that have been 
put forward by President Clinton.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. Hooley].
  Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding 
to me.
  Mr. Speaker, in some of these things I will be repeating the same as 
the gentleman from New Jersey, but I think they are worth repeating. It 
is alarming, the number of children in this country who do not have any 
health care. Again, it is over 10 million children with no health care. 
Every minute, every minute, three children lose their health care 
coverage. By the year 2000 if nothing changes, as many as 12.6 million 
kids will have to depend on an emergency room as opposed to a family 
physician.
  Let me try to tell the Members what that means for our kids. Most of 
the uninsured children are at risk for preventable illnesses. For 
example, one in two uninsured children who have asthma do not visit the 
doctor during the year. As a consequence, these kids end up in the 
hospital with problems that could have been prevented with proper care. 
All we need to do is look at the kids that are uninsured who have ear 
infections, a very common problem for kids. One in three never see a 
doctor, and many end up with permanent hearing loss.
  It is situations like these that make me think about the parents who 
lay awake each night wondering what they can do when their kids get 
sick. There is no instinct as basic as that instinct to protect one's 
children and care for one's children.
  Today there are too many parents in America who cannot act on that 
instinct. The real tragedy of the situation is that these are parents 
who play by the rules. Nine out of ten uninsured children have parents 
who work. These are not deadbeat parents, these are parents who work, 
but their employers do not provide coverage for their employees' 
children.
  We have Medicaid that helps the very poorest of the children, and we 
have families that are well off that can afford insurance, and we have 
some people that work for employers who provide that insurance; but we 
have millions of parents who work every day, who are trapped in the 
middle. They have just enough money to cover their food or their 
housing and clothing for their children, and they simply do not have 
the money to pay for health insurance. But we can help. I think it is 
time that we provide some kind of targeted tax credit that will help 
working families provide that health insurance that their kids so 
desperately need.
  This is not a new government program. We can do it within our current 
structure. It is a way to make the current health system work for 
working families.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is a very practical, commonsense solution to 
a growing problem. It is a problem that every parent caught in the 
middle has to deal with, and we need to make sure that these parents 
can provide for their children. We cannot afford to do anything 
different.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, again I think the Children's Defense Fund 
report that both of us are making reference that really explains to us 
what the nature of the problem is.
  Some people have said to me, why is it that the number of children 
who do not have insurance has gone up in recent years, because Congress 
has made an effort over the last 10 or 20 years to expand Medicaid, 
which of course is the program for those below a certain income, and 
many States have actually instituted programs to try to cover those 
children who were not eligible for Medicaid on their own. So we had 
this effort over the last 10 or 20 years to expand Medicaid on the 
Federal level and

[[Page H1006]]

to also have States address the problem.
  I think the Children's Defense Fund report explains very well, the 
reason why those efforts have not been enough is because during that 
same period, the last 10 years or so, we have seen fewer and fewer 
employers that provide any health insurance coverage for children, and 
also they increasingly charge the employee either the full cost of a 
group plan or a significant portion of the cost, which makes it 
unaffordable.
  We also have the phenomenon now increasingly where an employer will 
pay either all or part of the cost to the employee, but not for the 
family. That was not the case so much in the past.
  Just to give some statistics again from the report, it says that more 
workers are on jobs that either provide no health insurance benefits or 
require employees to pay unaffordable amounts. In 1993, more than 
three-quarters of employees at medium and large companies had to pay 
some or all of the cost of family health insurance provided through 
their employers. In 1980 the proportion was less than half.
  Then it gives some statistics from the Health Insurance Association 
of America that says the total cost of family health coverage in 1992 
averaged $4,500 to $5,000 a year, but in 1993 employees of medium and 
large companies themselves paid an average of $1,300 a year for family 
coverages. Employees of small companies were even worse off. They paid 
an average of $1,900 a year.
  So what we see is moderate-income working families who live from 
paycheck to paycheck who simply cannot afford, even if the employer 
offers a policy, they cannot afford that coverage. That is why all our 
efforts, and of course they were good efforts on the part of Congress 
and the State legislature, have helped, but we continue to slide back 
because of increasingly the situation with people not getting health 
benefits through their employer.
  Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Last weekend I was at home, Mr. Speaker, in 
Oregon, and I was at a community health program. I talked to some of 
the people there. I think it is helpful to hear some real life stories. 
I can give a lot of them, but let me just repeat a couple.
  I was talking to one woman who had three children, two smaller ones 
and a child that was 9. She had no health care coverage. She was 
working. She worked for $6.50 an hour. She was working about 26 hours a 
week. Her employer provided no health insurance for either her or her 
children. Her husband worked. He had a very low base pay. He worked on 
commissions. Some months he made better than others.
  In Oregon we have what is called an Oregon Health Plan, but because 
you have to be consistently at a certain pay level, some months he made 
more so he was not eligible, and then the months that he made less, by 
the time he got eligible he was into a month where he made more. But 
the fact is, they never had enough money for insurance.
  So they have three children, both parents are working, he is working 
full-time, she is working more than half-time, neither company provides 
insurance for their children. They are living really month to month, 
and in this instance, they were able to go to a community health 
program where they paid on a sliding scale and got some attention, but 
it is very difficult. It is a community health program that has too 
many patients, no more room to expand, so they are also restricting the 
number of people they can see.
  Another person I talked to was a father of four kids, two sets of 
twins, and his youngest child got sick, one of the younger twins. He 
took that child, he said, all day long from clinic to clinic to clinic, 
and he was turned away. He was turned away at the emergency room, 
trying to find some place to take his child. Again, no health care.
  He was a person that worked hard, worked full-time. He worked three 
different jobs, but he traveled, so he worked 3 months or 4 months or 5 
months on one job, another 4 or 5 months on another job, and so again 
the employer did not cover the cost because he was not there full-time. 
But he was not a person that was not working very hard at what he was 
doing, but barely able to make ends meet. That is a very common story.
  Mr. PALLONE. I think what the gentlewoman described is a very typical 
situation. I know in New Jersey I have people come into my office with 
very similar types of situations, either because maybe they are not 
working full time at the same job, or they have several jobs. It is 
just very common.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Pelosi], 
who has been out front on the issue of health care coverage for a long 
time.
  Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership on 
this and so many other issues of importance to the people of our 
country, and for calling this special order. I am pleased to join him 
and one of our new Members of Congress, the gentlewoman from Oregon, 
and I thank her for her leadership on all of these issues, as well.
  Mr. Speaker, I serve on the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human 
Services, and Education of the Committee on Appropriations. On that 
committee we deal with the welfare of America's children in many ways: 
their health, their education and well-being, and the economic security 
of their families, which is related to their well-being, that is for 
sure.
  What we see in that committee from the scientists who come in and 
tell us what the possibilities are now in science, and what we know 
about the development of children's brains, is how important it is for 
them to have the proper nutrition and care before they are born even, 
and how essential that is, and that investments in their good health 
are very good investments for our country indeed.
  The opportunities are great. Knowledge that we have gives us plenty 
more opportunity to help our children not only reach their own personal 
fulfillment, not only strengthen the families from which they come, but 
also enrich our own country in terms of our family values and our 
economic strength. So we all have a responsibility to these children.
  Every parent, of course, has a responsibility to his or her child, 
but on our committee we are trained to think of every child in America 
as our child, all the children as our children, because indeed they are 
our responsibility.
  So in Congress, we have a responsibility, as well as State 
legislatures have a responsibility, to expand health care coverage to 
insure America's nearly 10 million--as has been referenced by my 
colleague--uninsured children. These are important efforts.
  We also have responsibilities as a society, every segment of the 
society has a responsibility to help children receive necessary health 
care. Parents should use every opportunity to buy health insurance and 
provide for the care of their children. Employers must renew their 
willingness to provide workers with family health coverage and other 
family supporting benefits. They should stop dropping coverage for 
children and pay premiums for family coverage. States should ensure 
that all eligible children are enrolled in Medicaid, and should adopt 
good child health programs like those adopted in 1966 in New York and 
in Massachusetts.
  Again, the Federal Government must also help working families obtain 
health insurance for their uninsured children. A child's chances of 
growing up healthy and strong should not depend on what State he or she 
is from. We have a Federal responsibility.
  Any initiative on children's health coverage must be effective, not 
symbolic or cosmetic, and should include certain basic principles.
  I too want to acknowledge the good work of the Children's Defense 
Fund for helping to define the problem, to quantify it in statistics, 
the challenge we face, and to qualify it in terms of the nature of the 
problem we are faced with. I associate myself with the principles they 
have advanced that state that uninsured children, at least through age 
18, and uninsured pregnant women should receive coverage for all the 
full range of necessary services, including care required for children 
with special needs.
  The proposal should build on successful private, State, and Federal 
efforts to help working families afford health insurance for their 
children, and while there is a broad consensus that working parents 
should help pay for their children's private insurance, the cost must 
be affordable, it must be based on family income, and must allow all 
families to obtain coverage and seek care for their children.

[[Page H1007]]

  While I think it is very important for employers to retain and in 
some cases obtain health insurance for their workers, I think that the 
sad part of all of this debate about children in America is it is so 
obvious that it is such a good investment, that these children will be 
stronger in every way if they are invested in in terms of their good 
health. But also the fact that we have to talk about a public role I 
think speaks to the fact that wages in America have not risen with our 
great economic success. In some ways, government is once again being 
called upon to subsidize a low wage in America.
  Every working parent should either have health insurance with his or 
her job, or have the ability to purchase health insurance for their 
children. No wonder some people find it a matter of survival to have to 
go on welfare in order to receive Medicaid benefits if their children 
are sick and they simply have no other recourse. Let us not have 
seeking health care be an incentive to go on welfare. That is exactly 
the wrong direction. But also let us look to the needs of not only 
people on welfare, but to the working poor in America and their health 
care needs.
  I thank the gentleman once again for his leadership on this.
  Mr. PALLONE. I want to thank the gentlewoman, and I think 
particularly what she said at the end there about how unfair it is, or 
the disincentive it creates, that in fact people who are working 
oftentimes do not have health insurance for their children, and yet 
people who fall below a certain income are on welfare, and end up 
having health insurance.
  We certainly do not want to encourage people not to work, which is 
basically the disincentive that is sometimes built into the system. I 
think that is very important. I appreciate her comments in that regard.

                              {time}  1845

  I wanted to also mention, going back to what my colleague from Oregon 
said, the situation with regard to self-employed, part-time temporary 
workers, independent contractors, parents working for very small 
businesses or service sector companies. These are the areas that the 
Children's Defense Fund points out where they are very likely to have 
parents who work, but they are not having any health coverage for their 
children.
  What is interesting about it is, if we look at it from a cost point 
of view, because we always have to be worried about cost in the 
Congress, is that the parents who do not have access to a group policy 
through their employer often have to pay $6,000 a year or more, 
according to the Children's Defense Fund, if they buy a family health 
policy on their own.
  Obviously when you talk in those kinds of numbers, it is completely 
out of the question for many of these working families. The other 
thing, going back to prevention, because I think we continually have to 
stress that, the cost that is saved, the amount of money that is saved 
through preventative measures, and they give some very good examples 
with the Children's Defense Fund report where they talk about 
preventative care and say that each dollar invested to immunize a child 
saves between $3.40 and $16.34 in direct medical costs. Nine months of 
prenatal care costs $1,100, 1 day of neonatal intensive hospital care 
for a low-birth-weight baby costs $1,000. On the average, hospital 
costs for low-birth-weight babies are 10 times the costs of prenatal 
care.
  Mr. Speaker, they give an example in Florida where a rural county 
provided all children and pregnant women access to outpatient health 
care and the rate of premature births dropped by 39 percent. The 
percentage of children receiving checkups doubled and emergency room 
visits were cut by nearly 50 percent.
  We had some discussion in our children's health care task force that 
the Democrats have about the costs and estimates basically around $500 
per child if we were actually covering every one of the 10 million 
children who do not have insurance. So compare that $500 to the cost 
that some of these families are paying annually, well, they can't 
afford it. But if they could afford it, I mean the bottom line is that, 
if you devise a program that takes in most of these children, it can be 
a very relatively, a very cheap policy as opposed to the costs of 
insuring an adult or senior citizen.
  Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. A lot of these parents, they cannot afford a 
full policy. They find it unaffordable. It is not that they are not 
willing to pay some money and squeeze out some money out of a very 
limited budget for some health insurance. It is the cost. Mr. Speaker, 
if we go out and buy individually for a family or what we were talking 
about, if they work for a small business, they are a part-time worker, 
there is maybe not a policy in their company, and for them to go out 
and buy that individually is very expensive. But these are, if it were 
a little more affordable, these are people willing to help and pitch in 
to pay for part of it. They just cannot afford the whole coverage.
  It reminds me when we talk about the cost and about prevention, I do 
not know if we remember the old television ad: You can pay me now or 
pay me later. It is one of those, if we do not take care of them now, 
we really do pay so much more later on.
  Mr. PALLONE. Exactly. That is true.
  Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to mention briefly that obviously there 
are various proposals that Democrats have put forward about how to deal 
with this problem. The President has a proposal, some of our leaders in 
the House of Representatives have proposals. I just thought I would 
mention a few of them. We do not, not necessarily saying which ones are 
better than others. One of the things is to just mandate that insurance 
companies provide a kids-only policy because there are a lot of parents 
who cannot afford, for example, or may decide that they do not want to 
cover themselves but still want to cover the children.
  My understanding is it is very difficult to buy that kind of policy. 
So you could actually say that any insurance company that does business 
with the Federal Government, for example, has to provide a kids-only 
insurance policy.
  The other options that have been put forward, one is H.R. 560 by the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Stark] that establishes a new Medicare-
like entitlement program for children under age 18, so we could expand 
Medicare. We could expand Medicaid to bring in some of the children.
  The other one, another one, H.R. 561, by Representative STARK again, 
authorizes a refundable tax credit for 95 percent of the costs of 
children's health insurance. So again, we could use tax credits as a 
way of trying to provide coverage.
  I wanted to also mention Senator Daschle has S. 13, which establishes 
a Federal program of subsidies for children and families with income 
under 75,000. So we could basically subsidize care, based on sort of a 
sliding scale, based on what a person can afford. And of course the one 
that, the proposal that has probably had the most coverage in the media 
was what President Clinton proposed in his budget. Basically he has a 
number of provisions to expand health insurance. He has a State 
administered program of temporary health insurance premium assistance 
for unemployed workers and their families. He has a Federal grant 
program to encourage the development of voluntary health insurance 
purchasing cooperatives, and then he has grants to States who expand 
children's health insurance.
  Mr. Speaker, I just mention these because there really are a variety 
of ways to accomplish this. Frankly, it is not that costly. The more 
children you include, the less the cost actually becomes per child.
  I think that I want to leave everybody with this tonight, and of 
course we have been saying this over and over on the floor the last 
couple of weeks or the last couple of months now, is that as Democrats 
we feel very strongly that this issue needs to come to the House floor. 
We would like the Republican leadership to give us a date certain and 
say as of such and such a date, I think the President throughout the 
date of July 4, that as of such-and-such a date, a children's health 
insurance proposal or some combination thereof will come to the House 
floor. We will have an opportunity to consider it and to vote on it.
  What was really bothering me is that in discussing their priorities, 
the GOP basically has not included this issue. And I think that is 
wrong because it is

[[Page H1008]]

an issue that must be addressed. That is why we are going to be here 
almost every day or at least several times a week talking about the 
nature of the problem.
  Ms. HOOLEY of Oregon. Again, all I want is a chance for it to be 
brought up so we can look at all of the different ways. I think we can 
do it within the current system, but I would like to see it brought up 
so we can have that debate on how do we solve this problem, how do we 
cover our kids with health insurance, a critical issue, one facing an 
incredible number of families. Just think about it, three kids every 
single minute. We have been talking I do not know how many minutes, but 
three kids each of those minutes we have been talking loses their 
health insurance. It is an issue we just have to face.

  Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Serrano], 
who has been on the floor several times in the last month or so talking 
about this issue.
  Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank once again the 
gentleman from New Jersey for bringing us together, as you have on 
different occasions, to discuss this subject.
  I was back in my office at the beginning of this hour listening to 
the comments of both of you as well as other Members. It dawns on me 
that one of the things we see in this House quite a bit of and 
throughout the Nation recently is in the last few years people 
celebrating the fact that the cold war is over and that we have played 
a major role in bringing that about and that we were very influential 
in changing the way different countries behaved.
  I think we have to celebrate that. I think it is good. It is a good 
sign about who we are as a people and a nation.
  But I think that when we do that, we also have a responsibility and 
that is to every so often look inward and take a look to see what we 
are accomplishing right here at home.
  When you look at the figures, for instance, in my city of New York, 
where 25 percent of all the residents under 65 are not covered by 
health insurance and where 20 percent of all children under 18 are not 
covered by health insurance, we know that this is a very serious 
problem. But what is interesting about it, both of you brought this up, 
is that 22 percent of those who are insured work for corporations, for 
companies that have more than 1,000 employees. That is an alarming 
statistic.
  We thought that if you were working, one, two, working for a large 
outfit, everything would be fine. Here we have the wealthiest city in 
the world in the wealthiest Nation on Earth with 25 percent of its 
population not insured.
  Then there is a contradiction in that we say, if you are very poor, 
as so many are in my south Bronx district, we will cut you here and 
there, but we will try to find a way to take care of you. But what you 
have to do is get yourself out of the condition and move forward. And 
when some people do by their bootstraps and in some cases with past 
government help move out of that condition, they find themselves then 
not having the availability of health insurance for themselves and for 
their children.
  How are we judged throughout the world? How do we judge ourselves? 
Well, some of us would say that because we have a great army, which is 
always ready, that we are a great nation, and that because we have 
accomplished so much in technology and other fields, we are a great 
nation. And we are and those are good signs of what we have done.
  But I think that there is taking a bite out of our existence and our 
future as a great nation and our present as a great nation the fact 
that so many of our children are uninsured. And I do not understand why 
anyone in charge of this House would say, we are not going to include 
that as an issue for discussion.
  I represent a district that has many titles. It is one of the more 
compact districts in the Nation. You can walk my district from one side 
to the other in 30 minutes. That is good for me. It is also bad because 
my opponent can walk it in 30 minutes also. It is one of the youngest 
districts in the Nation. It is at times one of the poorest districts in 
the Nation.
  And I have had friends of mine come to visit the district, and the 
first thing they say to me is, there are so many children: children who 
are going to school, children who are living in the neighborhood, 
children who are looking towards the future. The majority of those 
children have parents who are working, and yet the reason we are here 
tonight and the reason we have been here before and the reason we will 
continue to be here is because there is something terribly wrong at 
this moment in our country when we have allowed the situation to get 
out of hand to the point where if you did not know that you were 
watching Members of the U.S. Congress, you would think that you were 
watching members of another parliament or another government discussing 
conditions in their country. These are American children, and we are 
the country that claims that we have solved so many problems.
  I would make the same request that I made when I joined the gentleman 
from New Jersey before, and that is, if you are a parent, if you are a 
guardian of a child who is not going through this condition, as you 
help that child with his or her homework tonight, as you put that child 
to sleep, as you cuddle and tuck that child in bed and pray with him 
and feel good about the fact that you have got a good family which is 
doing well, maybe perhaps you will just take another 15 minutes and 
write to a Member of Congress and say, I put my child to sleep. My 
child has health care. My child is OK. I may complain about other 
things in this society and what Government is doing, but this is OK. I 
do not have a problem with you if you deal with this issue so that 
other children can have what my child has and that other parents can 
feel as good as I feel about my child's safety.
  I think what we need to do is to begin to have people who are in a 
better situation than others to defend the need for those folks to have 
something a little better than what they have now.
  I think that eventually we will be measured amongst many things in 
terms of how we treat our children. If we have to continuously get up 
to bring up this subject and it does not get solved, then that will be 
our failure. So I would hope that we come together, that we continue to 
do this. And once again, I want to thank you for the opportunity to 
join you tonight and to continue to ask you to continue this fight. You 
have been the leader on it for such a long time. Do not give it up. It 
is the right thing, and we will stand by you together as we do this.
  Mr. PALLONE. I thank the gentleman. And I particularly appreciate 
what he says about getting our constituents to reach out and other 
constituents to reach out to their Members of Congress to make them 
aware of the fact that this is a crisis and that it needs to be 
addressed.
  I do not like to give out what I would consider unfavorable 
statistics about our country, because I am so proud of our country, but 
you mentioned about our situation here in America versus other 
countries. If you look at, again, this is from the Children's Defense 
Fund, this report we have been talking about this evening, they point 
out that in every industrialized country children get better health 
coverage than in the United States. Every other industrialized country 
provides health coverage to all its people.
  America, of course, does not even cover all its children. The United 
States ranks 18th in overall infant mortality. Only Portugal does 
worse. And if the United States matched Japan's infant mortality rate, 
more than 15,000 American babies who died before their first birthday 
in 1994 would be alive today.

                              {time}  1900

  The United States ranks 18th in the percentage of babies born at 
dangerously low weight. No industrialized country does worse. Again, it 
is not because we want to point out bad things about our country, but 
it is really shocking and it is really shameful that in the greatest 
country and the wealthiest country in the world that we have to point 
out those statistics with regard to infant mortality and health care.
  Mr. SERRANO. If the gentleman will yield, I think he makes an 
interesting and a very important point. This is not about knocking 
ourselves, about turning our backs on our country. This is not about an 
unpatriotic act.
  This is about the fact that the strength of the country is in the 
future

[[Page H1009]]

of its children, and if at the present we cannot provide them with 
health care, not to mention other harm we may bring to them, if we 
cannot provide them with basic health care, if we cannot allow a parent 
to feel the safety of knowing that that child will get sick and will be 
covered by health insurance in a country where you have to pay for 
medical care, if we cannot do that and if we keep quiet about it, then 
we are not honoring our country, I think. We are just dishonoring the 
country.
  We have to speak up and say this is a problem. But we are not saying, 
``This is a problem, fix it.'' We are saying, ``This is a problem. You 
as a majority party bring the issue to the table and give us the 
opportunity to participate with you in finding solutions.''
  Again, and I will close with this, as I said before, we have 
solutions. We have covered X amount of people. If we were inventing a 
health care system in this country, that would be a problem. If no one 
was covered and we had to start from scratch to cover people, that 
would be a problem. But most Americans are covered by a health plan. So 
what we have to do is make sure that others are covered. We do not have 
to reinvent the wheel.
  This should not be so difficult if the willingness is there, if the 
desire is there, if we begin to accept the fact that there are people 
in this society in certain conditions not because they chose those 
conditions or brought them on themselves, if we get out of that 
mentality and say, ``Yes, I am my brother's keeper. If there is a 9-
month-old baby who is not covered, that is my problem, too. If there is 
someone uncovered somewhere else, that is my problem, too.''
  If we get into that mentality, then I believe we can deal with this 
issue. We do not have to reinvent the wheel or set up a new plan, just 
deal with what we have in this country, just make sure it is fair and 
expanded to all.
  Mr. PALLONE. I agree completely. Again, I want to thank not only the 
gentleman but also the gentlewoman from Oregon because she continues to 
point out, I think a major point here, we are talking about working 
people who are willing to pay either all or some of the cost of the 
health insurance for their children. But unless we establish some 
system, as the gentleman from New York said, to build on the existing 
plans that are out there, they just do not have access to it, or it is 
too costly for them because they do not get it through a group plan, 
through their employer or whatever. We are talking about working 
people.
  We are going to continue to do this over the next few weeks and the 
next few months, I hope not the next few months because I hope our 
colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle will be willing to bring 
this up at some point in the next few months. But we have to keep 
talking about it because it really is a crisis, as the Children's 
Defense Fund report points out.

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