John Shaw: “there is also another area that I think that there is great misunderstanding, there is the part referring to SSI for…”

“there is also another area that I think that there is great misunderstanding, there is the part referring to SSI for noncitizens. We have a genuine disagreement with the President. We thought we came up with a better solution. The President's plan would call for 60 percent of noncitizens, the elderly, to come off of SSI. We did not want to do that. So what we did, we grandfathered in all of the noncitizens that were receiving SSI on August 22, when the welfare bill was signed. We thought that was much fairer than pushing them out and then having them come back and prove that they were disabled, knowing that roughly half of them would never get back on and they would lose their Medicaid as well as their SSI payments. This is very important. We thought ours was the more humane way to go. The President thought it was best to take the elderly off and exchange their benefits to allow people that were here on August 22 that might become disabled, most of them will not, but those that did become disabled sometime in the future could get onto SSI. It is a disagreement we have, but it I might say in the full committee, after we made our argument, no one even offered the President's plan. No one offered the President's plan in the Committee on Ways and Means. Why? Because they did not want to hear the argument that they were throwing the elderly off. I do not blame them. I would not have offered it either.”