Jay Rockefeller: “In response to the Senator, I wholly agree with what he said, by trying to make two points. One is that when we were…”

“In response to the Senator, I wholly agree with what he said, by trying to make two points. One is that when we were first contemplating this children's health insurance bill and the whole key concept of maybe getting as much as $24 billion, or even perhaps more than that, it was sort of understood that first we were going to insure 5 million children of the families that had the least resources to buy health insurance, and then we would move on to those who had a little bit more resources but still would not be able to afford buying health insurance from the private market for their children. We were talking about 10 million children. There was a lot of opposition to insuring 10 million children. It wasn't 40 million Americans, but it was 10 million children. Then even with the $24 billion that was applied to the program we are now faced with the prospect of maybe only being able to cover 3.6 million children, leaving, therefore, many of the 10 million uncovered.”