I am strongly committed to providing health insurance to children from low-income families.  To advance this goal, I have repeatedly taken steps to strengthen children’s access to health care.  I have backed efforts to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), or FAMIS in Virginia.  This program has been extremely successful in providing health insurance to millions of low-income children nationwide, including 155,000 children in Virginia.  With my support, Congress worked in a bipartisan manner to pass an expansion of the SCHIP program in 2009 to cover approximately 4.1 million additional uninsured children nationwide and an additional 55,000 in Virginia over the next five years.   

I have also worked with my Senate colleagues to fight pediatric diseases.  I cosponsored the bipartisan Conquer Childhood Cancer Act of 2007, which advances medical research and treatments into pediatric cancer, promotes public awareness of this disease, and establishes a population-based national childhood cancer database.  I am pleased that this legislation was signed into law on June 29, 2008.