Pete Domenici: “fellow Senators, the truth of the matter is that nobody knows, nobody knows today how to cover these children who are…”

“fellow Senators, the truth of the matter is that nobody knows, nobody knows today how to cover these children who are uncovered in America. Nobody has a plan. Nobody knows which plan to use. Obviously, a very large number ought to be put under Medicaid. But they will not all fit under Medicaid, so another plan has to be developed for the rest of them. Frankly, this Senator is convinced that we can devise a plan in the Finance Committee of the U.S. Senate that will cover them all and will not even use the $16 billion. That is just as honest a statement as my friend from Massachusetts makes when he plucks a number, because we do not know what it is going to cost. Mr. President, do my fellow Senators know that if you went out 6 months ago across America and you said, ``Let's buy health insurance for some uninsured kids; let's just go around to the insurance agencies and say, `How about giving us an insurance bid,' '' there was no policy until about 2 months ago when a company decided to issue a policy. Nobody even knows, since it is the only one, whether its price is going to remain when they all start issuing them, for it is, indeed, not expensive to cover children; everybody knows that. One of the reasons given to cover them is it is not very expensive to cover them.”