Frank Pallone: “Really, for a long time, the Republican leadership was essentially ignoring this issue of kids' health insurance, the 10…”

“Really, for a long time, the Republican leadership was essentially ignoring this issue of kids' health insurance, the 10 million uninsured children that my colleague mentioned. Now that it is in the budget agreement, and presumably there is a pot of money, I think about $16 billion over 5 years, that is available for this. It is not likely that that amount of money would cover, as my colleague said, more than about half of the 10 million children. But, obviously, what we want to do as Democrats is to make sure, on the one hand, that the $16 billion that is available covers as many kids as possible. Then we also feel very strongly as a group, and I know the Democratic task force does on health care, that we need to go beyond that and try to find a way to insure the other kids that are not currently insured.”