Judd Gregg: “first, I appreciate the acknowledgment of the Senator from Missouri of my views on the Part D proposal. She is correct…”

“first, I appreciate the acknowledgment of the Senator from Missouri of my views on the Part D proposal. She is correct, I did not vote for that proposal because it was not paid for. I don't think one expensive program deserves another expensive program, especially when the second expensive program is backed with very poor policy. What I wish to talk about tonight is the policy. The issue, of course, should be how we get more children insured and how we get fewer people uninsured in this country. There are a variety of ways to do that. I have had a number of proposals of my own in this arena. However, it is not a good idea to approach this issue of how we get more children insured by suggesting that the best way to do it is to take a lot of kids off private insurance and move them on to public insurance or to, under the nomenclature of protecting children, which is, of course, very popular--and we have had lots of pictures on this floor already of children who have gone through very serious health concerns who need to have the support of the health community, of using children and pictures of children and anecdotal stories about children for the purposes of using a Federal program which is entitled children--to cover adults, some adults who, in fact, do not even have children. There are a lot of serious policy problems with this initiative. The irony, of course, is this initiative is not about insuring more children, although that is a stated goal.”