Pete Domenici: “let me try for a couple of minutes, and if Senator Lautenberg would like to chime in, and obviously the distinguished…”

“let me try for a couple of minutes, and if Senator Lautenberg would like to chime in, and obviously the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee is here. I think it is fair to say, for starters, that the issue of uninsured children--that is, children without any health insurance--has been a longstanding issue. But in all honesty, it has only become an issue that has been looked at diligently in an effort to see how you might change the way we were doing things this year. As a matter of fact, it is very interesting, if uninsured children as a class were a big insurable group, it is interesting to note that you could not buy health insurance for children. In other words, if some State had decided, ``Let's go ask Aetna or somebody else, do you have an insurance policy we can buy just to insure kids?'' it is within the last 6 months, I understand, that for an exclusive child health care insurance policy--it is a very short-lived instrument that exists.”