Frank Pallone: “I don't want to give a course in history here tonight, but I have to take issue with what my colleagues from Tennessee…”

“I don't want to give a course in history here tonight, but I have to take issue with what my colleagues from Tennessee and Georgia just said with regard to the children's health initiative. First of all, I think it's really important, and I know you say this all the time, that we're not here as ideologues. I'm not here because I'm a liberal or a conservative or because I want a government-run program or a privately run program. As far as I'm concerned, if everybody could get health care under some kind of privately run insurance program and it was all affordable and we could cover everybody, that would be fine with me. The only reason that the SCHIP or the children's health program was set up about 10 years ago, and I was there and I was part of it at the time, and it was done on a bipartisan basis, Republicans and Democrats supported it, was because we realized that there were more and more children in this country that were going without health care.”