After the Children's Defense Fund, a lobbying group, claimed that 10 million American children were not covered by health insurance, the federal government responded by committing $40 billion over five years to provide Kidcare, the White House vowing to sign up at least 5 million uncovered children by 2000. But since the program's enactment in 1997, fewer than 500,000 children have enrolled, leading the administration to launch a $1 billion "outreach" effort, complete with a toll-free telephone number, to sign up as many children as it can. But a survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that even among families with incomes of $10,000 or less, 97 percent of children get all the health care they need, and less than 2 percent cite lack of money or insurance as a reason for not getting care. As Robert Goldberg of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center notes, another study by the National Bureau of Economic Research even found that uninsured children tended to be healthier than those covered by Medicare regardless of income or race, with notable increases of illness rates among low-income children after starting to use Medicare.

Another lobbying group, the Families USA Foundation, claimed that 13 percent of senior citizens were forced to choose between buying food and medicine. That led Rep. Tom Allen to propose the Prescription Drug Fairness for Seniors Act, a broad entitlement program projected to cost $40 billion a year, and a key component of the failed 1993 Clinton health care plan. But the government's Consumer Expenditure Survey found that seniors, on average, spent less than half on prescription drugs than what they spent on restaurants, home furnishings, clothing, or entertainment, and about a third what they spent on health insurance—about 2 percent of their disposable income. Even the poorest senior citizens were spending less on drugs than dining out.

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