Children's Health Care Coverage

Floor Speech

CHILDREN'S HEALTH CARE COVERAGE -- (House of Representatives - September 25, 2007)

Mr. CUELLAR. Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago, in a bipartisan manner, Congress enacted the Children's Health Insurance Program to provide health coverage to those who need it the most. Since that time it's been a success story providing health care coverage to 6 million children.

When I was a member of the Texas State legislature, I had an opportunity to help implement the first CHIP program in the State of Texas there in Laredo. Again, it's a story that's worked very well.

In fact, as the program grew, the number of uninsured children in our Nation has dropped dramatically, even though child poverty was on the rise and many of the families were losing their employer-based health coverage.

Unfortunately, this trend has started to reverse itself. For 2 years in a row the number of uninsured children has increased. There are now 8.7 million children in our Nation who are uninsured. Those numbers are a clear sign that Congress needs to pass a bipartisan agreement that was reached last week and will be on the floor today that will provide access to quality health insurance to 10 million low-income children.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bipartisan agreement. Again, Democrats and Republicans need to come together for the Nation's children.

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