http://www.senate.gov/~finance/sitepages/hearings.htmThis could be good.
From last year's hearing. (Tell me JK couldn't say the same thing this year.)
KERRY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, welcome. We appreciate you being here today, and this is obviously an area of enormous interest.
I heard some of the comments back in my office of the ranking member and others with respect to the specific amounts per state, and I know you're going to pursue that.
But let me just say that I have a lot of difficulty with this budget and with the proposal for a lot of different reasons. You've been a governor. You've balanced budgets. You know what honest budgeting is all about.
And I regret that the overall budget that's in front of us, I think, is significantly a shell game. Many people have pointed that out in different ways. But in the 22 years I've been here, it's one of the most inaccurate, almost dishonest, budgets that I've seen.
It doesn't cover the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn't cover Social Security. It doesn't reflect the permanency of the tax cuts, which is almost $1.6 trillion. I mean, none of this is in the budget.
There's almost $5 trillion of proposals that you guys are fighting for that aren't in the budget. So there's a different set of books, totally different set of books. It's sort of Enron-style accounting.
You've got a set of books over here for what you really want to do, and then something you present to us. I don't know why you didn't just present something that said you balanced the budget, because it would have been, in effect, the same thing.
Now, you have a proposal that you're calling Cover the Kids. Cover the Kids: implication, we're going to cover the kids in America. There are 11 million children without health insurance in America, correct?