Political Quotes

“I don't believe we have any more, but I still have 8 minutes, so I am going to share a few comments. Mr. Speaker, I want to say a couple of things. When I chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, we did try to do some reforms on healthcare, certainly, and there was a big disagreement, but we also extended funding for community health centers, the biggest increase they had ever gotten, 2 years fully funded. The chairman and I both are supportive of a 5-year extension of fully funding community health centers going forward. In my State, I think we had 63 different places people got healthcare in my district, and 122-- well, a lot of people in Oregon go through community health centers. As chairman, I led the effort in this Congress the last session to fully fund a 10-year expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. That is the biggest expansion, I think, in modern legislative history, probably. Many Democrats voted against it when I tried to get it extended for 4 years, and then a lot of Democrats voted against it when it was 6, and then eventually we got to 10--unprecedented. We got that into law. We eventually came together and we got that into law. We have done a lot of work on special diabetes program funding and a special program for those with diabetes in our Native American community. One thing after another, in the last Congress, we accomplished in a bipartisan way.…”