[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 152 (Tuesday, October 9, 2007)]
[House]
[Page H11324]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SCHIP EXPANSION
(Ms. FOXX asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, Congress's SCHIP legislation is seriously
flawed. It takes a bipartisan program that was working well and turns
it into a huge new entitlement.
It is a bold step towards government expansion into socialized
medicine. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 2 million
children who are already covered by private insurance will switch to
the SCHIP program under the proposed expansion. This is more than one
in three of the projected new enrollees.
In plain terms, this means we are providing incentives for people to
drop their health insurance in favor of government-funded health care.
And many of the people who will be dropping their health insurance will
be making as much as $60,000.
This doesn't make sense. The government has no business luring
Americans onto the Federal health care rolls and making them dependent
on the government to provide health care.
Call it what you want, but this $35 billion expansion is not just
about getting health care for kids. It is the early stages of a massive
socialized health system that slowly erodes individual control in favor
of government control of your health care. We don't need to be doing
that.
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