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Campaign for Community Values Applauds Passage of SCHIP in the Senate
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Vote seen as victory for grassroots community
Friday, Jan 30, 2009Washington – The Senate did right by America’s children and reauthorized the State Children's Health Insurance Program, ensuring that 11 million children from low-income families will have needed health insurance. The new version of SCHIP through the ICHIA provision restores eligibility for more than 300,000 legal immigrant children and thousands of pregnant women by removing a 5-year waiting period that was imposed a decade ago.
The Campaign for Community Values brought community leaders from across the country to Capitol Hill this week to talk to their representatives about the importance of passing SCHIP with the ICHIA provision intact. The 10 community leaders met with more than 40 Representatives and Senators this week.
The following is a series of statements from the grassroots activists who visited DC:"In the past week alone, we have made hundreds of calls to our elected representatives," says Susan McKay of the Tennessee Healthcare Coalition. "I personally flew to Washington to talk to them. So we are particularly pleased that both of our senators – Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker – voted for the SCHIP bill.”
"In Maine we believe in taking care of each other,” said John Bernard of the Maine Peoples Alliance. “Our children deserve to be healthy regardless of where they or their parents were born. We applaud our Maine senators for voting for SCHIP, and thus upholding Maine values.”
“This vote underscores the importance of having the grassroots voice heard in the halls of Congress,” said Gabe Gonzalez, director of the Campaign for Community Values. “This didn’t just happen, it was a monumental effort by thousands of community leaders making calls, writing letters and emails and dropping in on their representatives. We commend our Congressional leaders for listening to the people.”
“We are pleased to see Congress moving forward with SCHIP expansion; lifting the five-year bar to immigrant children and pregnant women is both the right and the smart thing to do,” said G. Smith, of the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations and coordinator of the Health Rights Organizing Project (HROP). “We all benefit when everyone in our community is healthy. There is no practical or moral reason to exclude families that work and pay taxes from our health care system.”
The Campaign for Community Values is bringing the voices of everyday people from around the country to the halls of the U. S. Congress. Nearly 100 community organizations representing 38 states will send local leaders for the next 14 weeks as part of an unprecedented grassroots advocacy push to unite our communities. This campaign is advancing an ambitious plan to rebuild the economy in a way that works for us all including providing healthcare of millions of children and passing just and humane immigration reform.
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The Campaign for Community Values is a national coalition of more than 200 grassroots organizations from across the country advancing policies to make America finally work for all of us. The initiative is led by the Center for Community Change, a 40 year-old national organization dedicated to building the field of community organizing, with hundreds of local organizations nationwide.
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