Frank Pallone: “If you could just yield to me for a second. I really appreciate you bringing this up because I think it is so much on…”

“If you could just yield to me for a second. I really appreciate you bringing this up because I think it is so much on point. And I know there is a lot of confusion. We have a fiscal year that goes from October to October. Last year, when the Republicans were in the majority, they didn't deal with the budget at all. They literally left at the end of the session in their lame duck in December and said, we can't pass the budget, we can't deal with the appropriations, so we are going to go home, and we will leave it to the next Congress. So literally last week, we had to adopt the budget of the appropriations of the previous year that had already began October 1st, and it was level funding. In other words, it was basically a continuing resolution that didn't add any money and used the previous year's budget as a baseline. And even with that, we were able to increase money for veterans' health, for Ryan White, which deals with HIV, for global AIDS, for the National Institutes of Health. The emphasis and the priority was on trying to provide more money for health care even as we were cutting other things, and we did that. The reality is that President Bush's budget that we got this week, which is for next year, because the last year's budget has not been passed in the Senate and gone to his desk yet, didn't even take into consideration, and in many of the cases, those health care items that he put in this budget are less than what we adopted in that continuing resolution.”