Frank Pallone: “But I wanted to just reiterate one of the things that my colleague said before we end, and that is that what we really…”

“But I wanted to just reiterate one of the things that my colleague said before we end, and that is that what we really are trying to do here is build upon the existing system. That is, we know that most people get their health insurance through an employer-based system; and we want to build upon that with some of these private health care reforms. Medicaid generally has worked and it can be expanded and made better. Lastly, with the matching grant programs, there are a lot of State private-public partnerships that are out there. A lot of States have done some very innovative things with private-public partnerships. I hope the matching grant program, if we can get that into effect, will build upon those various States' activities as well. So, idealogically, this really is something that can cross party lines because it does not really have any idealogy, it builds upon existing programs and it is something that I believe can be supported on a bipartisan basis.”