Frank Pallone: “Exactly. I just wanted to point to two surveys that were done, one involving the Medicaid safety net for children and…”

“Exactly. I just wanted to point to two surveys that were done, one involving the Medicaid safety net for children and the other for nursing homes. And just very quickly this is from an article that was in the Washington Post last November that says, ``Medicaid safety net for children could be imperiled.'' It was a report by the Journal of the American Medical Assocation. It said, ``From 1992 to 1993, an estimated 3 million children lost private health insurance as people lost jobs or employers stopped providing health insurance.'' But until now, increases in Medicaid coverage resulting from past legislation, congressional legislation, that broadened eligibility under Medicaid basically offset the fact that a lot of people lost their jobs and their children are no longer covered by health insurance. For example, they said that in 1988, 66 percent of all children under age 18 had health insurance based on the employment of a family member and 16 percent were covered by Medicaid, but in 1994, the share with employer base health insurance had propped to 59 percent and the Medicaid to 26 percent. So even though people were losing health care coverage for their children because they were losing their jobs in the last five or 6 years, because of the expansion of Medicaid coverage for children under Federal guaranteed entitlement status.”