Rep. Roy Blunt said he would agree to a state children's health insurance program (S-CHIP) that covered families with incomes between $40 and $60-thousand dollars a year, if Democrats were willing to drop coverage for higher income families.
Blunt made his comments in Springfield at the Jordan Valley Innovation Center during a tour Friday.
Blunt said a program that would cover "at least 90% of the kids in the first tier" and "eliminate those 400% of the poverty level" would be a bill Republicans could support.
Republicans in the House were able to sustain President Bush's veto of a Democratic expansion of S-CHIP this week.
"We're willing to see the program grow a little bigger . . . and certainly we're willing to spend a little more money than the President was willing to spend in his initial proposal, but not nearly the amount of money that our friends on the other side wanted to spend," Blunt said.
"They wanted to take a $5 billion dollar program a year and expand it to a $12 billion dollar a year program," Blunt said.
When asked if there was a real chance for a compromise, Blunt said "there has to be." "I think there really has to be a compromise unless you just want to demonstrate so visibly that this is politics," Blunt said, referring to the Democratic leadership.
He said the longer the Democratic bill floats out before the public, the worse it looks. On Friday, he cited statistics that in Minnesota, 87% of all people on the S-CHIP program are adults. In Wisconsin, Blunt said that number is 66%.
"We want a bill that puts poor kids first. We've done the right thing so far. We'll continue to reach out to the Democrats and hope they reach back," he said.
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