Ed Markey: “this summer the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, turned 20 years old. I served on the House committee that…”

“this summer the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, turned 20 years old. I served on the House committee that created this bill and was proud to support providing the affordable comprehensive health insurance to low-income children and pregnant women. It is a bipartisan program, and it is an effective program. Last year alone, CHIP covered nearly 9 million children throughout the country. In Massachusetts, CHIP has been instrumental in achieving near-universal coverage for our children in the Bay State. Yet, instead of celebrating CHIP's successes over the last two decades, congressional Republicans have placed CHIP in programmatic purgatory. That is because they allowed CHIP to expire at the end of September. Instead of focusing on reauthorizing this critical healthcare lifeline, Republican leadership chose to waste months of time trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They let just one of these successful programs lapse while they tried unsuccessfully to end another. They were more interested in ripping healthcare coverage away from millions of Americans and taking a machete to Medicaid rather than protecting our Nation's children. We should not forget that CHIP stands on Medicaid's shoulders.…”