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Kernersville News
By Kristen Johnson
Governmental Affairs Editor

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-5th District) will hold a first-of-its-kind “telephone Town Hall” conference with Fifth District constituents.

The telephone conference will take place from 7:30-8:30 p.m. During that time, Fifth District voters may call 1-877-850-4133 to join the conference. The password for the call is “Foxx,” or 3699.

“We’re incredibly excited about this,” Foxx said during a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon. “This is the first time we’ve done this. I talk to members of the voting public all the time and this is a great opportunity for them to call and ask anything they want to ask – and for other folks to hear the questions and answers.”

Most members of Congress do what Foxx called “robo calling” – a practice she says she opposes.

“They’ll automatically call 40,000 people or so and just leave an automated message telling them to ask questions at any time,” Foxx said. “I oppose that. I’d rather invite folks to call me at my office and make myself available to them than call them with robot messages.”

Any callers who call during that hour but cannot ask their question due to time constraints will be asked to leave a telephone number so Foxx can return their call.

“Nothing will go unanswered,” she said. “You can have several people on the phone lines at the same time, so folks can listen to see if their question is asked. This is a terrific mechanism for me to stay in contact with my constituents. I’m looking forward to it.”

During the telephone conference, Foxx may have to field questions about her votes on the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP).

Earlier this month, a group of local Democrats gathered at the intersection of Hwy 158 and Lewisville-Clemmons Road to protest Foxx’s votes on SCHIP. The local protest was held near Foxx’s office in Clemmons.

SCHIP was created in 1997 to reduce the number of uninsured children by providing subsidized insurance to children of the working poor. When it was created, Congress stipulated that enrolled children should come from families earning no more than twice the federal poverty level, or $41,300 for a family of four.

Foxx voted against a bill that would have provided funding for the expansion of the program above and beyond the additional $5 billion over five years proposed by President George Bush in his budget. She also voted against overriding Bush’s veto of a compromise measure.

In July, the Senate voted to allocate $35 billion over five years. Not long after, the House voted to increase funding for the program by $50 billion. Bush threatened to veto whichever plan came before him and, according to some national media outlets, called both plans “a step down the path to government-run healthcare for every American.”

Funding for SCHIP was set to expire on Sept. 30. Earlier that month, the House and Senate agreed on a compromise bill that included the spending increase proposed by the Senate and would, at the same time, rescind new rules put into place by the Bush administration that barred states from using existing funds to cover children at higher income levels.

After Bush vetoed the compromise plan, a House vote fell just short of the two-thirds majority needed to override his veto. Funding for SCHIP – at its current level – was folded into a stopgap budget measure meant to keep the federal government functioning until mid-November.

Asked on Tuesday her reasons for voting against funding for the extension of SCHIP, Foxx said she could name three major reasons why she voted against it.

“First, the bill as presented would have allowed 700,000 single adults to be covered when there are 500,000 children who are at 200 percent below the poverty level who aren’t going to be covered,” she said. “I couldn’t vote for that. We could take care of all those children if the adults weren’t covered.”

Foxx also said she voted against the bill because “people making up to $83,000 would have been able to get coverage.”

“That’s not right,” she said. “Under the bill submitted by Democrats, half of the children who would have been newly covered under SCHIP would have already had coverage under their parents’ insurance policy. These kids would have been taken off their parents’ policy, put under SCHIP, and then you and I would be paying for their health insurance.”

Foxx also said the proposed SCHIP bill “would have allowed illegal immigrants to have coverage.”

“All they would have had to do is show a false Social Security number and get coverage,” she said. “Then what do you have? You have people who need SCHIP but can’t get in on it because an illegal immigrant took their place. That’s not right.”

For Democrats to make their proposed SCHIP funding extension fiscally responsible, Foxx said, they proposed a $1 per pack increase in cigarette tax.

“They projected 22 million new smokers and said they’d charge $1 extra per pack of cigarettes to get this money,” Foxx said. “Where in the world did they come up with 22 million new smokers? You and I know that isn’t happening. The number of smokers is in steady decline. They inflated their revenue and ignored what would happen if they didn’t have enough to fund the program after the five year mark.”

In an e-mail newsletter she sent to her constituents recently, Foxx acknowledged the SCHIP debate is “a tough issue.”

“SCHIP has helped lower the number of uninsured children,” she wrote. “But recklessly expanding it at the cost of reduced Medicare benefits so that well-off families can get taxpayer-funding insurance is not the solution.”