Washington, DC - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today spoke on the floor of the Senate, urging passage of legislation to cover more children under the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). She also called on her colleagues to support bipartisan legislation, cosponsored by Senators Dole, Mikulski, Graham, Kennedy and Brown, that she has introduced as an amendment to the SCHIP bill that would extend the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) for up to six months for spouses and parents of soldiers who have been injured in combat. The amendment would enact a key recommendation of the Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors.

The following is a transcript of Senator Clinton's remarks on the Senate floor:

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Washington for her usual, very thorough, and persuasive statement on the floor about the need for flexibility in this important program and the recognition that healthcare, like everything else, costs differently depending upon where you are in the country. And I thank the Senator from Washington for reinforcing that important point.

But the larger point is this: today in this Congress, we are on the verge of providing the greatest expansion of health coverage for our children since the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program a decade ago. I believe--and I don't imagine anyone in this chamber would argue--with the belief that every child deserves a healthy start in life. Certainly, we try to provide that healthy start for our own children and we give a lot of lip service to the idea that we should provide it for all children, yet far too many children in our nation -- more than nine million -- do not have healthcare.

I was very proud to help create the State Children's Health Insurance Program during the Clinton Administration, working on this legislation during my time as First Lady. And after the bill passed, I worked to get the word out and try to help more children and their parents understand what this new program could mean for them and encourage them to sign up in the first few years. In the Senate, I have continued that effort, fighting to ensure healthcare for children has the priority in our budget that it deserves.

So today, thanks to the work of so many, CHIP provides health insurance for six million children. Now, in New York alone, almost 400,000 children benefit from this program every month.

With the legislation that Chairman Baucus and Senators Grassley, Rockefeller and Hatch helped to craft, an additional 50,000 children in my state of New York will have access to health insurance coverage. This legislation will also help enroll many of the 300,000 children in New York who live in families that are already eligible because their families make less than $52,000 a year--250 percent of the poverty level for a family of four. In total across our country, 3.2 million children who are uninsured will gain coverage. That will reduce the number of uninsured children by one third over the next five years.

Now, Mr. President, if we can afford tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and tax cuts for oil companies that are making record profits, I certainly think we can find it in our hearts and budget to help cover millions of children who deserve a healthy start.

I want to be clear, if the president vetoes this bill, he will be vetoing healthcare for more than three million children. And once again the President will have put ideology, not children, first.

Earlier this year, I was proud to introduce legislation with Congressman John Dingell to reauthorize and expand CHIP, and I'm very pleased that a number of the ideas in our bill are included in this legislation, such as cutting the red tape and bolstering incentives to get eligible children into the program.

The legislation also improves access to private coverage and expands access to benefits like mental health and dental coverage. This is so important.

And I really applaud the Finance Committee under Chairman Baucus' leadership. Mental health and dental coverage are too often left out when we talk about healthcare.

Well, not far from where I'm standing, in the state of Maryland, last year, a young boy, Deamonte Driver, had a toothache. And his mother sought help for him to be able to get dental care. She called dentists, but they weren't taking any more children on Medicaid or on CHIP, and then she got help from a legal aid group that helped poor families. They called around, and I think they called 27 or 28 dentists who said, look, our quota for poor kids is filled.

Well, Deamonte Driver's toothache turned into an abscess. And the abscess burst, infecting his bloodstream, and he ended up in the hospital where doctors valiantly tried to save his life from the brain infection that resulted from the abscessed tooth that had not been treated. This young man died.

And when one thinks about the loss of a child over something that started as a toothache, it is heartbreaking, but it is not by any means an isolated case. And at the end of Deamonte's life, the state of Maryland and the United States government ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for emergency care, for intensive care, for life support to no avail, for want of $80-100 to find a dentist who would care for Deamonte.

So, I really commend the authors of this bipartisan bill for their work and for bringing forward a practical, fiscally responsible compromise that will allow us to reauthorize this important program and expand coverage. And I'm eager to see that it is signed into law.

I am disappointed, however, that the bill we are considering this week fails to include the Legal Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act, which I introduced with Senator Snowe. Senator Snowe and I have been working on this for a number of years. This bipartisan bill would give states the flexibility to provide the same Medicaid and CHIP coverage to low income, legal immigrant children and pregnant women as is provided to U.S. Citizens. I will underscore that, we are talking about legal immigrant children and legal pregnant women.

I really believe that we should provide this flexibility to states because the current restrictions prevent thousands of legal immigrant children and pregnant women from receiving preventive health services and treatment for minor illnesses before they become serious. Families who are unable to access care for their children have little choice but to turn to emergency rooms. And this hurts children and pregnant women, plain and simple. And I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to lift the ban on Medicaid and CHIP coverage for low income, legal immigrant children and pregnant women.

I also am disappointed that some of my colleagues have expressed concern about states like New York, New Jersey and others that have chosen to cover children above 300 percent of the poverty level. The legislation we are considering on the floor would allow New York to continue doing this and receive the CHIP matching rate. We should not punish children and their families who live in high cost areas and who need healthcare coverage. And I encourage my colleagues to vote against any effort to undermine the extension of healthcare in high cost states where it costs more--as we heard from Senator Cantwell and her statement on the floor--to provide the same coverage and treatment one would get elsewhere in our country.

So, I'm proud that we are debating a bill to expand healthcare to 3.2 million children. But the fact is, there should be no debating the moral crisis of nine million children without healthcare; no debating the moral urgency of strengthening our healthcare system for children and all Americans. Ultimately, Mr. President, the answer will be in a cost-effective, quality-driven, uniquely-American program that provides healthcare to every single man, woman, and child in our country. But until we get to that point, it is imperative that the Congress pass this bill before we go out for recess and send it to the president with the hope that he will sign it into law.

I would also like to mention another issue we urgently need to address. Last week, the bipartisan Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors -- chaired by former Senator Bob Dole and former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala -- issued its final report on the need to reform the medical care that our troops and veterans receive.

The commission found, in an excellent report—it's not one of these commission reports that just take up a lot of space on the shelf; it’s very pointed with six specific recommendations—and it found that one of the most important ways to improve care for injured servicemembers is to improve support for their families. That's why I introduced a bipartisan bill, the Military Family and Medical Leave Act with Senators Dole, Mikulski, Graham, Kennedy and Brown, to implement a key recommendation of the commission. And we have offered this as an amendment to the CHIP legislation.

The Family and Medical Leave Act was the first bill signed into law under the Clinton Administration. It came about because of a lot of hard work led by Senator Dodd here in the Senate and others, and it has proven to be enormously successful, helping more than 60 million men and women who try to balance the demands of work and family. I believe it is time to strengthen the Act for military families who find themselves in a very difficult situation. They should be given up to six months of leave to care for a loved one who has sustained a combat-related injury.

Currently, these spouses, parents, and children can receive only 12 weeks of leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. All too often, this is just not enough time, as injured servicemembers grapple with traumatic brain injuries, severe physical wounds and other problems upon returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In fact, 33 percent of active duty, 22 percent of reservists, and 37 percent of retired servicemembers reported to the commission that a family member or close friend had to leave their homes for extended periods of time to help them in the hospital. About 20 percent said family or friends gave up jobs to be with them to act as their caregiver.

This is a step that we can take immediately that will make a real difference. Many of us have been to hospitals here in our own country—Walter Reed, Brook Army Medical Center-- and other places in the world, like Landstuhl in Germany, where we've seen our wounded warriors. There is no doubt that having the support, assistance and comfort of a family member during that process when a young man or woman who has served our country is brought from the battlefield to the hospital, makes a big difference in recovery and rehabilitation. I think all of us agree that not only do our men and women in uniform make tremendous sacrifices on our behalf, so do their families. And as a nation, we have a duty to provide them with the support that they deserve to have.

So, Mr. President, expanding access to healthcare for children and providing better support for our military families comes down to basic values that we as Americans hold dear. I think we all agree every child deserves a healthy start and every man or woman who wears the uniform of our country deserves more than words of support. The promise of America is rooted in these values, and I am very proud to support the bipartisan legislation expanding healthcare for children. And I urge my colleagues to join me and the Senators from both sides of the aisle who are supporting our military families who are caring for those who have been injured in service to our country.

And, Mr. President, finally, we hope that on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue there will be a change of heart, that the president will decide to sign this legislation and relieve the burdens of ill health and inadequate access to healthcare that haunt the lives of so many American families. Mr. President, please support this effort in every way possible by signing the legislation that will be sent to you. I yield the floor.

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