I had my annual hearing before the General Assembly Joint Finance Committee yesterday. The News Journal coverage catches the gist of my pitch for funding for affordable health insurance. You can read the article here.

The preparation every year for the Joint Finance hearing is intense—it is the one time each year that the legislators get to grill you about your budget and operations, and the legislators usually have a lot of detailed questions. My hearings have gone very well each year because we have been so prepared, and I was ready to roll this time as well. But this year turned out very different.

I pointed out to the committee members that this was my last visit—I said, “A year from now, I will either be lowering the chin-up bar in the Lieutenant Governor’s office or asking a first-year lawyer at a law firm how to find the new courthouse.” And what it prompted from the legislators, instead of questions, was a series of testimonials about the job that I and my team had done over the last few years at the Insurance Department. I am a loyal Democrat and proud of it, but I have to admit that I was touched to hear some of the Republican members of the committee talk about how impressed they were with the fights I took on for consumers.

At the end of the hearing, there was applause—which is also not the standard ending for a Joint Finance Committee hearing. The visitors section was full of insurance lobbyists who had come to watch my hearing. Senator Cook, the co-chair of the committee, looked at them and said “I don’t see you guys clapping.” I said “They’re cheering on the inside, Senator.”

This job is never boring.

In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, I was constantly approached by people on the street who said, “Matt, I want a treat I can make for my significant other that combines the innocence of childhood with something, say, 150 proof.” As is often the case, one of my favorite websites, the Food Network, has the answer: Rum Hot Chocolate.

Today is my annual trip to the General Assembly Joint Finance Committee to discuss the Insurance Department budget for the upcoming fiscal year. My hearings have been fairly uneventful, since the first thing I did when I arrived in 2005 was to tell the committee that I was going to run the department without a dime of taxpayer money (we are now funded entirely by surcharges and fees imposed on national insurance companies). They like that.

What I am going to emphasize today, though, is that even in a very tight budget year, the state must seriously consider funding the health insurance purchasing pool proposal that Senator Blevins, Representative Hall-Long, and I have pending before the General Assembly. In fact, here is a blog-readers-only, exclusive preview of what I will say about that in my testimony:

While we are not asking for any additional money for our department, I do want to take the opportunity to ask for one appropriation of funds should they become available. As you all know, I have been asking the General Assembly for three years now to create a health insurance pool to provide affordable health insurance to the underinsured and uninsured in our state. As you also know, the design of the pool requires a state subsidy in order to make it work.

As I am up and down the state every day, there is no issue I hear about more than health insurance – from families or from businesses. I’m sure you hear it, too. While a period of economic downturn may not be the easiest time for you to consider spending money on a new program, it is exactly the time when the need for more affordable health coverage will become greater. I urge you to consider funding the health insurance pool should revenues improve. It would be a giant leap forward for Delaware and, I believe, would make Delaware a model for the rest of the country.

We are getting ready to start putting the Denn volunteers to work on the campaign trail, if you are willing to start putting in some time to make this state a better place for its kids, drop me a note at mattdenn@hotmail.com.

If you noticed the article in Saturday’s paper on my legislative agenda for this year (you can read it here), you were probably too dazzled by its substance to notice that it was written by Eric Ruth, who doubles as one of the News Journal’s food critics. When Mr. Ruth called me about the article, I told him that I thought he had the best job in Delaware. It reminded me that the Eric Ruth of Seattle, Washington is my little sister Becky, who is a food critic and editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has her own blog, which is beautifully written but essentially consists of taunting everyone else in America about the awesome food she is eating. You can read it here. I have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and stand in the cold in front of supermarkets, she gets to eat at some of America’s best restaurants on someone else’s dime, and then get paid to write about how tasty it is. This is not right.

In other news, one of the many things that I like about Barack Obama is that he married a beautiful, capable woman named Michelle. So did I. His is coming to Delaware on Thursday to campaign for him, you can get more details at his campaign website http://www.barackobama.com/.

I will give you the bad news first. In spite of now being three years old and fully capable of wiping their hands before pawing at me, my children have nevertheless ruined all of my suits. Yesterday they triumphantly sullied the last one. I have had to triage my jackets with the least amount of banana smeared on them (at least, I hope it’s banana), while waiting for the local dry cleaners to struggle mightily to save the others. So if you see me on the campaign trail in the next few days and want to tell me that there is something on my suit…don’t.

The other bad news is that the House Republicans yanked yet another one of the consumer protection bills I proposed from the House agenda yesterday. This bill, which had passed the State Senate by a 20-0 bi-partisan vote, was designed to regulate “medical discount plans”–health plans that often look like health insurance but really aren’t. The plans are targeted at low income communities which have high uninsured rates, and even the Federal Trade Commission (overseen by the somewhat-less-than-consumer-friendly Bush administration) has identified these plans as an industry that needs to be watched. Thanks to the House Republicans, they will go unwatched in Delaware for at least a while longer. The Republicans’ excuse for yanking the bill yesterday was that they hadn’t realized I was going to testify in favor of it—apparently they thought we would argue for the bill through interpretive dance–and they needed to fly in special experts from the industry to testify against me. I will hold my breath. Thanks to Representative Helene Keeley for fighting to try to get this one done on behalf of consumers.

Now for the good news. First, the upside of the House Republicans selling out consumers was that I actually got out of Dover at 5:30 and unexpectedly got to see the boys before they went to bed and watch American Idol with my wife. Not a bad consolation prize. And second, yesterday was the filing deadline for 2007 campaign finance reports, so we finally found out where I stand with respect to the fundraising part of the Lieutenant Governor’s race. As the News Journal is reporting this morning (you can read it here), I now have a 5-1 fundraising advantage over my only announced opponent. That is great news, and to those of you who contributed and helped give me this advantage, thank you. To those of you who didn’t, you can fix that right now by taking out your credit card and clicking here.

The next time one of the Republican members of the House of Representatives Insurance Committee says “If Matt would just make a deal with the insurance companies, we would pass some of his bills,” I will give him a copy of this article from yesterday’s Washington Post. To summarize it for you, it describes how the insurance industry convinced Florida’s legislature and Republican Governor to pass a bunch of pro-insurance company legislation with the promise that it would reduce homeowners insurance rates, and—you may want to sit down for this—many of the rates have actually gone up.

I promised you yesterday some big campaign news. Well, here it is. We just finished our fundraising report for 2007, and we not only broke all of the fundraising records for a Lieutenant Governor campaign, we shattered them. As best we can tell from state records, my campaign bank balance at the end of 2007 was triple that of any past candidate for Lieutenant Governor at the end of a pre-election year. Needless to say, that is great news.

What does this mean for the campaign? First of all, it means that I can spend more of my time this year talking to voters and less of my time raising money. Don’t get me wrong—there is still a lot more to raise, so you should keep checking your Caller ID. But it certainly makes things easier. More importantly, it means that I will have the ability to communicate my message about the welfare of Delaware’s children to voters. Running for a statewide office means that no matter how hard I work, I can never talk to each voter individually, so having the money to communicate with voters through the media means that voters will actually learn what I want to do if I get elected. That is huge.

Many of you who read this blog also contributed to my campaign, so to each of you a heartfelt thanks. To those of you who contributed in the last six weeks and are still waiting for your thank you note, please stop calling me an ungrateful wretch (that means you, mom)—the letters are going in the mail today. Now, with the election year upon us and the funds to at least start doing what I need to do, it is time to go out and tell the voters how I am going to help change this state. I hope you will join me.

Tomorrow, we will have some important news to announce about my campaign on the blog. For today, it is my pleasure to provide you with Adam’s favorite music video, a late 1950s live, souped-up performance of “Lonely Teardrops” by the late Jackie Wilson. Adam’s infatuation with Jackie Wilson is totally random—he saw my Jackie Wilson’s Greatest Hits CD in the front seat of the car, was intrigued with the fact that it was purple, and asked for the “Purple Music.” Now Purple Music has temporarily eclipsed The Wiggles.

The only downside of Adam loving this video is that he keeps trying to duplicate Jackie’s patented “dropping to the ground and getting back up” dance move, but so far he has only got the collapsing to the ground part down so I keep thinking he is having some sort of seizure.

Zach is currently into the Chicken Dance. As LBJ might have said, I will not look for a chicken dance video on YouTube, and if I find one, I will not post it.

Yesterday, a bi-partisan group of legislators, an honor roll of child advocates, and I gathered at Legislative Hall to announce the introduction of a bill I have proposed to use the free and reduced price lunch information that school districts have to locate uninsured families who might be eligible for free or lost-cost health insurance through Medicaid or the CHIP program. You can read about it in today’s News Journal here. We also announced a new program that my office will be pursuing through the state’s school nurses, to try to involve nurses more directly in signing kids up for CHIP.

This bill and the nurse partnership are both great efforts (if I do say so myself), but they aren’t enough. The statistics are grim. There are over 19,000 uninsured kids in Delaware. My optimistic goal with this bill and the nurse program is to increase enrollment by 1,000 kids. That would be a 20% increase in Delaware’s CHIP enrollment—huge by any standard—but our rolls of uninsured kids would still be unacceptable.

That is why getting every kid in Delaware health insurance by 2010 will be one of my primary goals as Lieutenant Governor. That is not a bumper sticker slogan, it is something that a couple of other states are moving towards doing, and that we in Delaware can do as well if we make it a priority. Universal health care coverage for adults and children is my ultimate goal, and I think we will get there. But covering every kid is an important, achievable interim step, and I will be putting my campaign hat on soon and talking about how we should get there.