Lynn C. Woolsey: “One thing I would like to call to everybody's attention is that these 10 million children that are not covered, more…”

“One thing I would like to call to everybody's attention is that these 10 million children that are not covered, more than 80 percent of them live in families with at least one working parent. That is a huge number. We are not talking about welfare recipients, we are talking about the working poor who work every day as hard as everybody else, or harder, at maybe more than one job, and they cannot afford health care for their children. One of the reasons that businesses do not provide it is that health care costs are going up again. One of the reasons we supported HMOs in the first place, and HMOs were going to be the savior for health care, is because the cost of health care leveled as the number of HMOs grew in this Nation. Now we have passed that nexus. Health care costs are going up in rapid, rapid numbers, and the quality of the HMO is going down, so we have to put that floor. That is what HMO reform would do, managed care reform.”