WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, Senator John Kerry made the following remarks on the floor of the Senate.  Kerry introduced his amendment to fully fund SCHIP to $50 billion over 5 years – the level originally allocated in the budget.  The additional $15 billion proposed by Kerry’s amendment is paid for by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $1 million a year and would impact only two-tenths of one-percent of taxpayers.

Kerry’s amendment is supported by ACORN, American Academy of Nursing, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, American Medical Student Association, Child Neurology Society, Child Welfare League of America, Children’s Defense Fund, Children’s Dental Health Project, The Children’s Health Fund, The Children’s Partnership, Coalition on Human Needs, Easter Seals, FamiliesUSA, First Focus, National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, National Association for Children’s Behavioral Health, National Association of County and City Health Officials, National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, PICO National Network, SEIU and Voices for America’s Children.

Below are Kerry’s remarks as prepared for delivery:

First, I’d like to extend a much-deserved thank you to my colleagues on the Finance Committee – Senators Baucus, Grassley, Rockefeller, and Hatch – who have shown such tremendous leadership in bringing this bill to the floor this week.  This legislation is good for our nation’s children.  Though I hope we can come together to do more, I will support this bill.  And as we debate the future of children’s health care today, I want to honor the work of Senator Kennedy, whose visionary leadership helped create S-CHIP in 1997 and whose tireless bridge-building has helped sustain the program ever since.

Mr. President:  This week, Washington has a great opportunity to extend health insurance to millions of children who lack coverage today.  

Our choices here will have a major impact on families across the country.  The real face of this debate doesn’t belong to a Senator or the President or a health-care bureaucrat somewhere— it belongs to people like 9-year-old Alexsiana Lewis and her mother Dedra, from Springfield, Massachusetts.  Alexsiana was losing her vision due to a rare eye disease, and her mother Dedra lost her health insurance when she cut back her hours to care for her daughter.  Listen to what Dedra said:

“If I didn’t have MassHealth right now,”—S-CHIP funded health care—“my daughter would be blind.”  

Do we really want to leave children to go blind?  Do we really want to leave our families hoping to dodge a bullet – one that comes in the form of an illness they can’t afford to treat or a doctor’s bill they can’t afford to pay? 

At a moment when people across the country are losing faith in Washington, this is a moment for this Democratic Congress to remind the voters why they sent us here:  to deliver on our promises and get things done that improve the lives of America’s families.  

We should be building on the success of a wildly popular bipartisan program like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.  And, outside of the Administration, Republicans and Democrats alike, in overwhelming numbers support spending more money on children’s health.

This should be easy—and the proposal reported out of the Finance Committee represents a solid start toward addressing the moral and economic injustice of leaving 9 million children uninsured in the richest country in the world. 

It also includes a provision I authored with Senators Smith, Kennedy, and Domenici to ensure mental health parity in the S-CHIP program.  Parity for mental health treatment is a significant, much-needed improvement to S-CHIP.  Instead of discriminating against mental health—which is effectively what we’re doing now—we can offer services that improve children’s performance in school, keep them out of trouble and the juvenile justice system, and lead to better lives filled with greater opportunity and promise.   This is a good investment—it can literally transform a young person’s life. 

The bill has many good and important provisions—but $35 billion over five years is far too little for such an important national priority.   I believe that we must fight for a better option, and I ask my colleagues today to support an amendment I’m offering that would add $50 billion to S-CHIP and Medicaid over the next 5 years.  

How do we pay for it?  Well, we pay for the $35 billion in the current bill by raising federal taxes on cigarettes to one dollar per pack.  This tax itself will save adults’ lives as well as children’s—and, by reducing smoking-related illnesses, it will as well save our states money.  How do we pay for the extra $15 billion that I propose we spend?   By rolling back tax cuts for those earning more than a million dollars a year.  We’re presenting Congress with a simple and obvious choice: tax cuts for millionaires or insurance for over a million uninsured children?  

If we, as senators, don’t stand for insuring every child in America, then what do we stand for? If America can spend $10 billion each month in Iraq, surely we can also spend $10 billion each year on children’s health.   I would like to be able to tell a father in Fall River who was laid off when the Quake Fabric Plant closed that his child matters to us here in Washington.  I’d like to be able to tell a Farmer in Hadley who is barely scraping by that his child deserves access to health care too. 

Meanwhile, the President is threatening to veto the new money for S-CHIP—even at $35 billion.   When it comes to insuring all of America’s children, Congress and the White House should not be offering the voters a choice between doing too little and doing nothing at all.

Troublingly, this President has recently launched a disinformation campaign to denounce this bill as a larger Democratic strategy or plot to massively expand federalized medicine. He stubbornly pledged to veto this bill - before he had even read it. Apparently, confronted with a bipartisan compromise to extend health care coverage to half of the 9 million American children without insurance today, the president sees only a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

The S-CHIP program is not some Democratic plot to socialize, or “federalize” medicine.  First off, S-CHIP – like Medicaid before it – is a federal-state partnership.  Using partial funding from Washington, each state has broad flexibility in how it structures and implements its S-CHIP program. 

Another misleading statement we’ve heard is that S-CHIP is a Democratic Trojan Horse for socialized medicine—Of course it’s not.  It was passed in 1997 by a Republican Congress run by Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, working with President Clinton. Since 1997, when Senators Kennedy and Hatch worked across the aisle to launch this program, more Republican Governors have implemented and expanded S-CHIP than Democrats.  If S-CHIP is a Democratic plot, then why do so many Republican governors support it?  Take Indiana, for example.  The Republican governor, Mitch Daniels - Bush’s former budget chief - recently expanded eligibility for S-CHIP to 300% of the federal poverty level, or roughly $60,000 for a family of four.  

The President claims that new S-CHIP funding would push families like these from private insurance to government health care.  But Mitch Daniels and other Republican governors understand that simply isn’t the case for most families.  With the cost of private insurance for that same family approaching $12,000 per year, the real choice most eligible families face is this: S-CHIP or no health care at all.

In fact, the National Governors Association just this past week sent yet another bipartisan letter to the President stating their support for the “bipartisan reauthorization bill that provides increased funding” for S-CHIP now moving through the Senate.

And finally, S-CHIP is not government-run health care, either.  The vast majority of S-CHIP and Medicaid enrollees receive their coverage through private insurance plans working under contract with the states to administer benefits.  Far from socialized medicine, S-CHIP represents the type of common-sense public/private partnership that should be a model for broader health care reform.

Mr. President, we all know what matters to families in this debate.  For parents, nothing is more important than the health of their children, and nothing more frightening than the fear that when a child gets sick, a visit to the doctor is out of reach. 

Our families are scared they won’t have adequate care for their kids, and what is this President’s response?  He says, well, everyone has access to health care—just send your kids to the emergency room.  Hospitalized children without health insurance are twice as likely to die from their injuries as those with coverage, and uninsured kids are only half as likely to receive any medical care in a given year.  Is there anyone here who has ever been responsible for caring for a child, who honestly thinks this is a good way to do business?  To ask the least well off among us to get their basic health care in the emergency room? 

Our families are afraid that their children are vulnerable.  But what is the President worried about?  Tobacco companies and HMOs.  He’s threatening to veto this bill because he’s afraid that insuring a million more children will move a fraction of them from private insurance to government-financed programs – the so-called “crowd out” effect.  I find that strange given that economists estimate that nearly 80% of the benefits from the President’s health tax proposal would go to those who already have insurance.  Not to mention that experts estimate that the rate of crowd out in the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan is up to two-thirds. 

Ultimately, this decision boils down to a question of priorities—not ideology, as the President would have you believe. Washington politicians like to talk about values, but here’s a simple test of who actually values families: how much is it worth to you to insure every child in America?  The President says he has made his decision, but I urge him to reconsider a deeply misguided veto of legislation that would help America’s children.

This is also a test for Democrats. We must not bend to pressure from the White House or from special interests.  We must not be afraid to spend the money necessary—and I believe that’s no less than $50 billion—to enroll millions of children who lack insurance today.   

I realize that Senators Baucus and Rockefeller negotiated the best bipartisan package they could, and I commend them for doing so—but it’s just not enough.  

I believe we have come up short on the amount of additional money we are investing in S-CHIP and Medicaid—which means we are also coming up short on the number of low-income children who can receive life-changing health insurance coverage.  And that is simply unacceptable.  We can, and we should, be investing at least $50 billion –$15 billion more than the Finance Committee’s package—the amount we agreed upon just a few short months ago in our bipartisan budget resolution.  The best way to finance those extra $15 billion is to roll back the top rate cuts for people making over a million dollars a year.   As I recall, those people did pretty well back in the 1990s—before the Bush tax cuts took effect.

What do those additional $15 billion buy?   Coverage for more than 1 million additional low-income, uninsured children.  The current package reaches 3.3 million uninsured kids, but my amendment raises that number to approximately half of the 9 million children lacking insurance today.  This amendment helps states enroll the lowest-income uninsured children by increasing bonus payments available to states that meet or surpass their enrollment targets.

This new investment is aimed at the poorest of the uninsured, those eligible for—but not yet enrolled in—Medicaid.  The President says he is concerned that the government is stealing clients from private insurance. But what about these low-income kids?   These children truly have no other option.

This body has allotted a great deal of money—in the form of tax breaks, spending provisions, and wasteful spending left intact—to various causes, some more noble than others.  And so I repeat: this is a matter of priorities, and what is more important than children’s health? 

If Alternative Minimum Tax relief is extended, tax cuts for those with cash income of $1 million, that will cost $43 billion in 2007 alone.  Compare that with $10 billion each year for S-CHIP.  

We’ve refused to close a loophole in our tax on poor fuel economy that rewards gas-guzzling SUV manufacturers with $13 billion annually.   
Unless we reform Medicare Advantage – a program I support by the way – we will overpay private plans by more than $50 billion over the next five years, require traditional Medicare beneficiaries to subsidize those in Medicare Advantage, and reduce Medicare solvency by two years. 

My amendment is fully paid for, in accordance with PAYGO, by restoring the top marginal tax rate to pre-2001 levels on taxable income in excess of $1 million.  This would impact just two-tenths of one-percent of taxpayers with positive tax liability.

The President hasn’t always talked this way about children’s health care.  In 2004, when this President accepted his party’s nomination at the 2004 Republican Convention, he said, “in a new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for government health insurance programs. We will not allow a lack of attention, or information, to stand between these children and the health care they need.”

Today the President opposes more funds for S-CHIP and Medicaid, yet supports continuing overpayments to private plans in Medicare.   He says he’s standing on principle, but it just defies logic.  What principle could justify standing in the way of providing health coverage to a million more American children? 

Today the president calls a $35 billion investment in children’s health care a massive expansion of federalized medicine. I call it a good start.

I urge my colleagues to join Senators Bingaman, Sanders, Casey, Menendez, Durbin, Reed of Rhode Island, Brown, and Whitehouse who have cosponsored this amendment, and the dozens of national organizations who have endorsed it – including health care providers, child and family advocates, labor, and faith-based networks, from ACORN to Voices for America’s Children.

I urge my colleagues to make a bipartisan down payment of no less than $50 billion toward heath care coverage for all of our children.

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