Frank Pallone: “Well, again, I appreciate the gentleman bringing that up. The gentleman says that Texas has the largest percentage of…”

“Well, again, I appreciate the gentleman bringing that up. The gentleman says that Texas has the largest percentage of uninsured, but this is a problem that is national. Six years ago, when President Clinton first proposed the universal health care plan, which I think was a good idea and if we did not have all the opposition from the insurance industry and the Republicans that we probably could have worked something out that provided universal coverage, but now over the last few years we have been trying in some of these areas, as you mentioned, with the kids' health care initiative in particular, to try to plug up the holes and cover some of the uninsured in sort of a piecemeal fashion. It has been working, but even with that, even with the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill to deal with the problem of people having preexisting medical conditions not being able to get insurance and a lot of them can even with the kids' care insurance, we still have the number of uninsured growing nationally. We have to do more. One of the things that the President is going to announce tonight is a major new initiative to try to expand on some of these health care Federal programs to provide more coverage for the uninsured.”