SCHIP Expansion

Floor Speech

SCHIP EXPANSION -- (House of Representatives - October 09, 2007)

(Ms. FOXX asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, Congress's SCHIP legislation is seriously flawed. It takes a bipartisan program that was working well and turns it into a huge new entitlement.

It is a bold step towards government expansion into socialized medicine. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 2 million children who are already covered by private insurance will switch to the SCHIP program under the proposed expansion. This is more than one in three of the projected new enrollees.

In plain terms, this means we are providing incentives for people to drop their health insurance in favor of government-funded health care. And many of the people who will be dropping their health insurance will be making as much as $60,000.

This doesn't make sense. The government has no business luring Americans onto the Federal health care rolls and making them dependent on the government to provide health care.

Call it what you want, but this $35 billion expansion is not just about getting health care for kids. It is the early stages of a massive socialized health system that slowly erodes individual control in favor of government control of your health care. We don't need to be doing that.

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