Joe Barton: “I want to talk about enforcement of this 300 percent above the poverty line. The people that wrote the bill claimed that…”

“I want to talk about enforcement of this 300 percent above the poverty line. The people that wrote the bill claimed that we have got this hard cap above 300 percent in terms of family income. But if you look on page 76 of the bill, the first part of it, starting with line 5, says, ``no payment shall be made under this section for any expenditures for providing child health assistance or health benefits coverage for a targeted low-income child whose effective family income would exceed 300 percent of the poverty line.'' That sounds okay, but then here is the gotcha, beginning on line 13, ``but for the application of a general exclusion of a block of income that is not determined by type of expense or type of income.'' So you leave it up to the States to say you can't have an income level over 300 percent, but you can deduct $20,000 for a housing allowance or you can deduct $15,000 for shelter or whatever. So what you've got here is the classic bait and switch. I would say that the majority has listened to some of the concerns of the minority, but you're not really ready to address them substantively. You put the right verbiage in the first paragraph and then you take it away in the second. At some point in time we need to sit down together and really work these things out to make sure that you not only have the verbiage, you also have the enforcement. Now when that day comes, we will have a bipartisan bill.”