John Shimkus: “in 1997, a Republican-led Congress passed the State Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP, a program that combines…”

“in 1997, a Republican-led Congress passed the State Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP, a program that combines the best of public and private approaches to delivering vital health care coverage to low-income children across the country. Today this program provides coverage to 6.6 million children and has lowered the insurance rate by nearly 25 percent. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle decided not to include us in crafting the reauthorization of SCHIP. In addition, it included many other provisions affecting Medicare, without any input from the minority. The legislation put forth by the Democrats has many problems, and I have serious reservations on how they propose to fund this legislation. Specifically, there are proposed funding streams in the bill passed out of the Ways and Means Committee that seek to take money out of end-stage renal disease programs by establishing policies that are shortsighted and ill-advised. As currently structured, this proposal takes funding from among the sickest patients in the Medicare program, those who have end-stage renal disease, and reallocates it to a massive SCHIP expansion.”