September 27, 2007

Senator Clinton Calls on President to Sign Children's Health Insurance Bill into Law

Praises Senate Passage of Hate Crimes Bill

Washington, DC - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today spoke on the floor of the Senate, urging the President to sign into law the Children’s Health Insurance bill the Senate is expected to approve today. The bill also includes the Support for Injured Servicemembers Act of 2007, legislation Senator Clinton introduced along with Senator Dodd to provide up to six months of job-protected leave for spouses, children, parents or next of kin of service members who suffer from a combat-related injury or illness, enacting a key recommendation of the Dole-Shalala Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors. In her remarks, Senator Clinton also praised passage today by the Senate of the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. 
 
The following is a transcript of Senator Clinton's remarks:
 
Senator Clinton: Mr. President, today in this chamber we are considering three critical issues that go to the heart of values that we have as a nation --three pieces of legislation that seek to honor these values by putting them into action.
 
We have passed -- and I am proud to support -- a bill to strengthen our capacity to stop hate crimes by supporting local law enforcement. We will be passing the largest expansion of health care for children since we created the Children's Health Insurance Program during the Clinton Administration. And finally, included in this Children's Health Insurance Program legislation, is a provision that I sponsored and authored with Senator Dodd to support injured servicemembers by giving their families more time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
 
This is a banner day for the Senate and the Congress, and I am proud to join a bipartisan coalition in tackling these challenges, from children without health insurance to military families without the support they need.
 
Now, Mr. President, we will pass the CHIP legislation by a wide margin. And so the choice will then fall squarely on the shoulders of the president. Will he join us in helping injured servicemembers and in providing health care to 3.8 million children who right now don't have it? Or will he put ideology ahead of military families and vulnerable children? We, in this chamber, know what the right choice is. The American people also know what the right choice is.
 
Senator Clinton: I hope that our president will put progress over partisanship and join the bipartisan majority and the vast majority of Americans in believing we can no longer treat these challenges and the people who face them as though they were invisible.
 
I believe every child deserves health care, yet far too many children in our nation -- more than nine million -- do not have access to quality, affordable health care. That's a moral crisis, and it should be impelling us to act, and this Congress has done so.
 
A few weeks ago, I met Amy McCutchin, who was struggling to find health insurance for her two-year-old daughter, Pascale -- a healthy, lively, two-and-a-half year old. Amy works as a contractor while also going to school for her Master's degree. She's divorced. She lost her insurance because of the divorce. She's not offered insurance through her employer because she does freelance work. Unfortunately, Pascale and her mom are among the millions for whom the Children's Health Insurance Program is currently unavailable.
 
When I met Amy, she stressed, she's trying to do the right thing. She works hard. She's what we would call barely middle class. In fact, she can't miss a day of work or she doesn't get paid, but she's also going to school full-time, and she has to balance that with her work and the care of her daughter. She's falling through the cracks and so is little Pascale. It’s a story that's being told nine million times every day by the parents of the children without health insurance.
 
Senator Clinton: Today, we can tell a different story and create a different outcome. I was proud to help create the State Children's Health Insurance Program during the Clinton Administration. I worked on that legislation during my time as First Lady. In fact, after the bill was passed into law -- a bipartisan majority in this Congress making that happen -- I helped to get the word out to tell parents that help was on the way and to sign up children for the program in the first few years. In the Senate, I've continued that effort, fighting to ensure that health care for children has the priority in our budget that it deserves. And I'm proud of the progress we've made.
 
The CHIP program provides health insurance for six million children. In New York alone, almost 400,000 kids benefit from CHIP every month. And with that strong bipartisan, bicameral agreement, hammered out in this chamber by Chairman Baucus and Senators Grassley, Rockefeller, and Hatch, an additional 72,000 children in New York will have access to health care coverage. It will also help enroll many of the almost 300,000 children in New York who live in families that are already eligible for CHIP or for Medicaid, because they make less than $52,000 a year -- 250 percent of the poverty level for a family of four. Now, it sounds like a lot of money, I know, to some people around the country. It doesn't go very far in New York, and it's one of the reasons why so many children in New York don't have access to health care and why we're fighting so hard in New York to extend health care to those who need it and can't yet afford it. 
 
According to the Congressional Budget Office, 3.8 million children who are uninsured nationwide 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 making record profits, I think we ought to be able to find it in our hearts and in our budget to cover the millions of children who deserve a healthy start. I want to be very clear: if the president vetoes this bill -- as he has threatened -- he will be vetoing health care for almost 4 million children, and he will be putting ideology, not children, first.
 
Senator Clinton: Earlier this year, I was proud to introduce legislation with Chairman John Dingell from the House of Representatives 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 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. Some of you have heard me tell the story about the young boy living in Maryland whose mother wasn't on Medicaid, wasn't on CHIP, was struggling to get some kind of health care coverage for her children when her 12-year-old son came down with a toothache. And Medicaid and CHIP don't cover dental care in many cases anyway. So, even though she got onto coverage, she couldn't find a dentist who was available to actually provide the dental care. Her son continued to complain. The toothache turned into an abscess; the abscess broke. Next thing you know, the little boy is in the emergency room and being admitted to the hospital. But because the poison had already spread into his bloodstream, he had to be put on life support and Deamonte didn't make it. So for the lack of a visit to a dentist -- might have cost $80 to $85 -- a little boy lost his life. So expanding access to mental health and dental coverage is absolutely critical.
 
I also want to commend the authors of this bipartisan agreement for their work and for bringing forward a practical, fiscally responsible compromise. It represents the culmination of a lot of hard work, and I see some of the staff from the Finance Committee here on the floor, and I thank them because I know how much they did to make this possible.
 
I'm also pleased that the conference report includes the Support For Injured Servicemembers Act of 2007, legislation that Senator Dodd and I introduced to provide up to six months of job-protected leave for spouses, children, and parents of servicemembers who suffer from combat-related disease or illness. This amendment implements a key recommendation of the Dole-Shalala Commission, chaired by former Senator Dole who served with great distinction in this chamber and Secretary Shalala, who served for eight years under the Clinton Administration as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Their Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors came up with a number of recommendations, and those recommendations are supported by a broad bipartisan coalition in Congress.
 
Senator Clinton: You know, the families of our servicemen and women face extraordinary demands in caring for loved ones who are injured while serving our nation. Currently, these spouses, parents, and children receive only the 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
 
But as the Dole-Shalala Commission found, all too often, this is just not enough time. An injured servicemember usually grapples with not only physical injuries, but having been just a few weeks or months before a healthy, fit, young person and now with the loss of a limb or being blinded or burned, having to come to grips with all of that. That takes time, as well as medical care. And these new injuries that our servicemembers are suffering, the traumatic brain injuries that we're only now focusing on, are especially difficult.
 
You know, I remember being at Walter Reed a few months ago, and I met a young army captain who had been in a convoy hit by one of those Improvised Explosive Devices, resulting in the loss of his right arm and the loss of the ring finger on his left arm because he had his wedding band on his finger and the explosion had caused his wedding band to melt into his finger, unfortunately, causing him to lose that finger. I asked him, “Captain, how are you doing?” He said, “Oh, Senator, I'm making progress. You know, the folks are helping me get used to the prosthetic and I’m learning how to use it he said, but where do I go to get my brain back?” He said, “You know, I never had to ask people for help before. Now my wife has to make a list for me every morning, telling me where I have to go to meet my appointments and what I have to do when I'm there.” He said, “Where do I go to get my brain back?”
 
Well, these wounds -- some that you can see, some that you can't -- are extremely serious and require family members to be available. The language included in the bill expands leave to six months. It’s a step that we can take immediately that will make a real difference in the lives of these wounded warriors and their families, and I hope that the president will think about that before he vetoes this bill.
 
Now, I am disappointed that the CHIP bill doesn't include the Legal Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act, which I introduced with Senator Snowe and have been working on with her for a number of years. This bipartisan bill would give states the flexibility to provide Medicaid and CHIP coverage to low-income, legal immigrant children and pregnant women. I want to underscore that. We're talking about legal immigrant children and pregnant women.
 
Senator Clinton: 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. This hurts children, plain and simple, and I think it costs us money. You know, a legal pregnant woman who can't get prenatal care, may have a premature baby who ends up in a natal intensive care unit, which ends up costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I hope that we're going to be able to lift this ban and make it possible for states to access Medicaid and CHIP for legal immigrant children and pregnant women.
 
But, Mr. President, I could not be prouder that the Senate is voting on expanding health care to 3.8 million children. There is no debating the importance of this and the way that the Senate has come together in order to produce this result.
 
Finally, I am proud to support the bipartisan legislation which we have passed to strengthen our tools against crimes motivated by hate on the basis of a victim's race, ethnic background, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and gender identity. These are crimes not just against an individual but against a community. And what we have done by moving this legislation forward means that we are taking a stand on behalf of those individuals and communities affected. Hate crimes are an affront to the core values that bind us one to the other in our country, and we should dedicate the resources needed to prosecute these crimes to the fullest extent of the law.
 
I'm very proud of our country and I think we rightly hold ourselves up as a model for the ideals of equality, tolerance, and mutual understanding. But we cannot rest. We have to continue to fight hate-motivated violence in America. And with today's vote, the Senate is proclaiming loudly that the American people will not tolerate crimes motivated by bigotry and hatred, that we will punish such crimes and the bigotry they represent.
 
Senator Clinton: I would like to commend Judy and Dennis Shepard for their extraordinary dedication and leadership when it comes to the prosecution of hate crimes. The murder of their son Matthew was a tragic event for a family, but a motivating cause was created. No parent should ever have to bear what the Shepards have borne but their grace and their grit in going forward is inspirational.
 
The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is a step toward honoring their son's memory and everyone who's ever been afflicted by hate-motivated violence and harassment. And I want to commend my colleague, Senator Kennedy, for his longtime leadership on this important matter.  The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act condemns the abhorrent practice of victimizing people and authorizes the Justice Department to help state and local governments investigate and prosecute these appalling offenses and I would to commend my colleague and friend, Senator Hatch.
 
So today is a good day for the United States Senate, Mr. President. We're doing good work, and it may be at a glacial pace in some of our eyes, but I have faith in our system and I have the utmost respect for this body. And it's an honor to be part of it and to especially on a day like today, when we make progress on behalf of the values that America stands for. Thank you very much, and I yield the floor.

 

 



 

 

Read more statements by Senator Clinton concerning children's health insurance.


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