Arlen Specter: “this is an amendment which provides for reauthorization of Healthy Start. This amendment would reauthorize the Healthy…”

“this is an amendment which provides for reauthorization of Healthy Start. This amendment would reauthorize the Healthy Start program for an additional 5 years at $100 million a year. It is important that the reauthorization occur on this bill because, given the Senate calendar, it is highly doubtful that this issue will be raised on any other bill. In my capacity as Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Health and Human Services, I can say with some authority that we need the authorization so that we are prepared to make the appropriate appropriations. Healthy Start is a program which is designed to provide prenatal care to infants. I saw my first 1-pound baby more than a decade ago at the Alma Ellery Clinic in Pittsburgh and, at that time, I saw a baby about as big as my hand, weighing a pound. Some babies weigh as little as 12 ounces, and they are human tragedies, carrying scars for a lifetime, and they are very expensive for our society, costing as much as $250,000 each. In my position on the Appropriations Committee, I worked to start this program of Healthy Start, and it has had a really remarkable success. It has been in existence for 5 years, which is a relatively short period of time. But we already have statistics available that show the success of the program. The 1994 statistics received from the projects demonstrated that from 1984 to 1988, baseline statistics in Philadelphia show that infant mortality had decreased some 28 percent.”