Political Quotes

“I rise to speak about children's health insurance, an issue we hear about periodically but not nearly enough and an issue that will fast become a critically important question before both bodies, the Senate especially, because of what could happen to the Children's Health Insurance Program, which we call at the State level the CHIP program, known more commonly in Washington as S-CHIP, one of the great advancements in health care in recent American history. We can go back 25 or 50 years, and other than Medicare and Medicaid and maybe a few other examples, VA health care, children's health care has been a great success and I would say forthrightly a bipartisan success, but we need to keep it that way. I have a particular interest in this program because of the experience we have in Pennsylvania, as tens of thousands of families have benefited from the Children's Health Insurance Program that was signed into law and advocated strongly by my father when he served as the Governor of Pennsylvania. At the time Pennsylvania was a model for the country. This was the early 1990s I am talking about. When he signed that bill into law, Pennsylvania became one of the largest States with a new Children's Health Insurance Program which then became a model for the Nation. Here is how that happened. In 1997, Congress passed the bipartisan Children's Health Insurance Program signed into law in August of 1997 by President Clinton.…”