[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 167 (Wednesday, October 31, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13591-S13592]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, yesterday the President of the United 
States stood on the steps of the White House and had the audacity to 
lecture Congress about how to do our work. It is precisely a lack of 
Presidential leadership, potentially a lack of policy interest, and 
certainly a lack of understanding of responsible Government that is 
getting in the way of solving our Nation's problems--the President.
  This Congress inherited a growing deficit from Mr. Bush--his created 
deficit, not his father's; his--and Congress has committed to live by a 
pay-as-you-go way of spending which makes life very tough. It is the 
absolute height of hypocrisy to have a President who effectively 
frittered away, gave away, to his rich friends a $5.6 trillion surplus 
and to have him lecturing the Congress about skyrocketing spending.
  Did all of that go to his rich friends? No; most of it did. Some of 
it went to his brilliantly conceived war in Iraq which has made America 
a much less safe place to live, while the Taliban and others grow 
stronger in Afghanistan.
  America needed, when he took office and especially after 9/11, to 
make some substantial investments in our defense and intelligence 
infrastructure, as well as very new and very good homeland security 
initiatives to respond to the September 11 attacks and ongoing threats. 
That spending was required for our national security.
  Generally speaking around here, we take national security pretty 
seriously. We do on the Intelligence Committee. But that is not where 
the bulk of taxpayers' dollars has gone under this administration. 
Instead, we have given trillions of dollars away in tax cuts to 
millionaires and billionaires, and we are in year 5 of an 
astronomically expensive Iraq war with a failed strategy that is, as I 
said, making America less safe.
  I am going to say to the President, this is not a political speech. I 
do not often come to the floor of the Senate to speak. I prefer to do 
my work in committees and in conferences. But I am fed up and outraged 
at what has transpired from the White House.
  Meanwhile, on the home front, our domestic priorities, such as 
children, we have met a concrete wall of resistance. The veto of the 
Children's Health Insurance Program rests with him and it rests with 
him, President Bush, alone.
  The Democratic leader was talking about some of the falsehoods the 
President has used in arguing against--publicly, constantly, all the 
time--the Children's Health Insurance Program, none of which are true. 
All of those who not only created the program, as I did along with John 
Chafee and Orrin Hatch, but those of us who are working on it now, in 
an extraordinarily bipartisan way amongst ourselves and with the House, 
are trying to make it work. But over all that, there is this looming 
understanding that no matter what we do, the President is going to veto 
the bill. I will get into that later.
  So now the President is threatening to veto and then veto again and 
then veto again appropriations bills aimed at investing in other 
pressing domestic needs. While, at the same time he is pushing to make 
the tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires, that I referred to 
before, permanent while advocating little to nothing for hard-working, 
middle-class families.
  Congress is keeping its promise to the working-class families in West 
Virginia and around the Nation. We try to put the best interests of our 
soldiers, our children, our veterans, and our families first, and we 
have done so. We are the ones who have done that. If the President 
thinks that vetoing bill after bill and threatening to do so, setting 
the tone to do so, somehow achieves his goals, it is going to make him 
even less relevant to the American people than he is now.

  Let me comment a little bit more on his statement regarding CHIP, the 
Children's Health Insurance Program. It is certainly the best program 
since Medicaid in terms of health care and one which is working, 
according to all analysis, efficiently and effectively and humanely.
  As we all know, after months of intense negotiations between 
Republicans and Democrats, Congress presented a bill to the White House 
that would continue the health care coverage of the 6.6 million 
children currently covered and add on approximately 4 million more. It 
would give 10 million-plus children insurance, little children who have 
no health insurance, and we want to tend to that problem.
  It has been an entirely bipartisan process. Chuck Grassley, the 
honorable senior Senator from Iowa, Max Baucus, the honorable senior 
Senator from Montana, Jay Rockefeller, the honorable junior Senator 
from West Virginia, and Orrin Hatch, the honorable senior Senator from 
Utah have worked for months, more importantly have our staffs, on a 
bipartisan basis, have worked for months, 7 days a week, through the 
night, to try to make this bill work.
  The President wanted to put $5 billion into it, which would have cut 
a lot of children out of health insurance. Obviously, the Democrats 
wanted to put in $50 billion into it. The Republicans wanted to put $22 
billion into it. What we did, the four of us Senators who are doing 
this, met every single afternoon for weeks and for months from 5 to 7 
to figure out a way, arguing, walking out sometimes, negotiating, and 
finally coming to the figure of $35 billion, and we were all happy. We 
all shook hands with pride because we knew we were doing something good 
for America's children. There were no politics there. It was pure 
negotiations in the interest of the people who don't start wars, who 
don't get our Nation into trouble, and who don't have any health 
insurance.
  Congress met its responsibility. We did the right thing by our 
children. The President perhaps didn't understand the policy involved. 
I don't know. As the leader indicated, he didn't want to talk about it. 
But he certainly deliberately told a lot of falsehoods about the 
program, and the leader also discussed that situation, never mentioning 
that 91 percent of all children retrospectively and prospectively--the 
6.6 million plus the 4 million--are at 200 percent of poverty or 
below--91 percent, 9 out of 10.
  I see them with my eyes in West Virginia. I see them as a VISTA 
volunteer. I see them now as a relatively senior, though still junior, 
Senator because they are people. When their teeth are not fixed, their 
lives are changed. When their baby teeth are not fixed, don't worry 
about the adult teeth to follow; they are already compromised. And 
immunizations, EPSDT, all kinds of other health care needs.
  We did the right thing by our children. The President--and it was the 
President who decided to veto this bill--it was the President who 
abdicated his moral responsibility to our children in favor of tobacco 
and partisan politics, or ideology. It doesn't matter, does it, if he 
is going to veto the bill. I just came from a meeting a half hour ago 
where Republicans and Democrats from the House and Senate were trying 
to work out a compromise, but there was this looming sense that 
whatever we do was going to get vetoed, so it didn't make any 
difference.
  Ten million children--this isn't some controversial dam or earmark. 
This is uninsured children. Some of them had been previously uninsured 
and now are, and 4 million more who are uninsured. They are children. 
If you don't get a healthy start in life, everything is compromised--
your health, your self-esteem, your prospects, your future, your life. 
It starts with health care.
  It is the President who continues to tell these falsehoods about our 
bill to take attention away from the real issue. This is not about the 
cost of the bill, this is not about uninsured adults, this is not about 
illegal immigrants. This is about not wanting to give poor and low-
income children and children whose parents cannot afford private 
insurance access to something monumental called health care.
  The President said so himself in a statement which I can barely get 
out of

[[Page S13592]]

my mouth. He said to a Cleveland audience on July 10 of this year:

       I mean, people have access to health care in America, after 
     all. You just go to the emergency room.

  Mr. President, you cannot understand health care, you cannot 
understand any of its intricacies, you cannot understand any of its 
broad oversweeps and ever, not even once in your life, make a statement 
such as that. The last time as a Senator I was in a waiting room in an 
emergency room with a child was about 1 or 2 years ago, and we waited 9 
hours. So that statement, which is hard for me to say, alone, speaks 
volumes about his less than compassionate intentions.
  Yesterday, the President accused Democrats in Congress of going it 
alone without seeking input from Republicans. There is absolutely 
nothing that could be further from the truth. We sought input from him, 
and we were turned down. We have done nothing but work with 
Republicans. We were working with Republicans 45 minutes ago in an 
hour, hour and a half long meeting--I don't know how long. I think we 
are meeting again this afternoon--from the House. We are trying to 
resolve this, all at the same time understanding that at the end of the 
day it is probably all going to get vetoed. But we don't care because 
we do care about children. It is about children. It is about children 
and their right to have health care, and we are in a position to do it.

  I went to a high building in New York at the invitation of somebody, 
and I walked in and I was greeted very coldly. I sat down. I was stared 
at very coldly. I became moderately unhappy. So I decided to start out 
the conversation, which he had asked for.
  I said: How much are you going to make this year?
  He said: $183 million.
  But he said: If you people on the Finance Committee would do 
something about deferred compensation, I could make more.
  Now, this put me in a real kind of quandary. I didn't want to be 
impolite--I did want to be impolite, but I didn't want to show it--and 
so I said to him: How is it that I describe something called the United 
States of America? How is it that I deal with income disparity? How is 
it that I come from your $183 million, plus whatever it is if we did on 
the Finance Committee would give you more, to the fact that the average 
working family who pays taxes and works and has children in West 
Virginia has an income of $26,600 a year? How do I get from $26,000 a 
year to $183 million-plus a year and still call this the United States 
of America, which is trying to resolve income disparity and treat 
people fairly?
  I couldn't do it. The conversation was not pleasant, and I got up and 
walked out. I am happy to say the gentleman was fired a week later.
  So we have tried to get the attention of the White House. We have 
tried to engage the White House. We have tried to do it not for the 
sake of just simply crafting a bill, but because we have a passionate 
belief that goes back to 1996--a passionate belief that we are speaking 
on behalf of millions of American families who cannot afford something 
so basic as health care and that we can fix it for them for $35 
million, and that is over a period of years, but we were rebuffed. We 
were vetoed, and we have actually been vetoed verbally five or six 
times since.
  CHIP is a bipartisan program. The bill passed by the Congress is a 
bipartisan bill. It does have strong Republican support. There were a 
lot of Republicans in the House who voted for their version of the bill 
despite very obvious arm-twisting by the White House. If there is any 
hope left of enacting a children's health insurance bill this year, it 
is because there is still a bipartisan group of Senators and 
Congressmen who are working to keep it together.
  But if the President continues to mischaracterize our bill and engage 
in disinformation, then I would say to my colleagues: Enough is enough. 
Enough is enough. Either you are for giving kids a healthy start in 
life or you are not. It is that simple. Money is not the problem. 
Paying is the problem. Injustice is the problem. Poverty is the 
problem. Money is not.
  Well, the President has made his choice. For him, children evidently 
don't really need health care. They can just go to the emergency room. 
It is really a poignantly horrible statement for him to have made. I 
don't know if he has ever been to an emergency room. I have. He is 
entitled to his conscience, of course, and he is entitled to his 
opinion. He is entitled to protecting tobacco over protecting children. 
That is his right. He is the President. He has the veto pen, and he can 
sign or veto. He chooses to veto. But let us be very clear: He will 
have this as his legacy.
  As a nation, we have always done what is right by our most vulnerable 
populations, not sometimes as efficiently or as swiftly as we could, 
but as we could. Our seniors and our children have always been at the 
top of that. Now our veterans are sacred. Veterans, when they go to 
serve our country, are soldiers for their entire lives, and we protect 
them. If this President won't live up to that ideal, then it is time to 
get one who will.
  I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez). The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. KYL. Might I just inquire now, would we be beginning the 
Republican time for morning business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is still 9\1/2\ minutes remaining on the 
Democratic time.
  Mr. KYL. I understand we have permission to proceed, and I thank the 
majority for that and would note that when speakers come on their side, 
then they would be entitled to their time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the Senator from Arizona is 
recognized.

                          ____________________