JOHN LINDER: “I listened to fiscal conservatives rail against this bill, and I think about an article I read in this morning's…”

“I listened to fiscal conservatives rail against this bill, and I think about an article I read in this morning's Washington Post. Over in Arlington, which is just across the river, they have a clinic where people go who don't have health insurance and hope that their number is drawn from a lottery so that they can get to see a doctor. Our health care system is in serious problems, from the seniors all the way down to the young people in this country. Now, this bill says to the States, here's some additional money for you to expand coverage to your youngsters. Through no fault of their own, they're born into a home where there is no way to pay for health care. And we are giving the States, in this time of economic collapse brought on by the fiscal conservatives in this body, who said that we could spend and spend and spend, and never have to meet the day of reckoning, the people who are now going to suffer from that will be women and children. Children have nobody to speak for them but us. And for us to put that money out there and give them the opportunity to have health care is humane in the very strongest sense of that word. How anybody could vote against this, I have no idea, after you've wasted a trillion dollars on a war in Iraq, and have the real estate industry totally out of control, and then you say to the children, you can't see a doctor. What kind of body is this if we don't take care of children?”