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As part of the 1997 balanced budget deal, Gingrich agreed to a proposal to give block grants to states to pay for health care for uninsured children who didn't qualify for Medicaid. The deal forced Republicans to swallow a major new entitlement, the largest expansion of taxpayer-financed health insurance coverage for children since Medicaid began in the 1960s. Many Republicans saw the State Children's Health Insurance Program as too much government involvement in private industry and a step toward the mandated health insurance championed by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Gingrich not only supported the idea, he backed SCHIP's reauthorization in 2007. The budget deal marked a change in the pair's relationship from the days after the 1994 Republican "revolution" that made Gingrich speaker
-- and the two government shutdowns the following year. By striking the massive budget act, "They realized they could accomplish more by working together, even if that meant abandoning the liberal and conservative wings of their respective parties," Gillon writes. Gingrich and Clinton tried to do even more together, convening a secret meeting on Oct. 28, 1997, in the Treaty Room of the White House on revamping Social Security and Medicare
-- for which centrists would be the key to passage, Gillon wrote. The plan was for Clinton to propose reforming entitlements in his State of the Union speech, while Gingrich would respond with supportive words. But a week before the president's annual speech to the nation, the story broke about Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. "I knew it was over," Gingrich reflected of his partnership with Clinton, according to the book. Under fire from conservatives after his own lieutenants tried to overthrow him, Gingrich left Congress in January 1999. The House impeached Clinton on charges connected to his testimony about an affair, but the Senate acquitted him. Fast-forward a dozen years, and Gingrich is casting his role in the 1990s economy his way. "This country has enormous potential ... to balance the budget, as we did for four years when I was speaker," Gingrich said on Fox News. In fact, the national debt went up, not down, during the four years Gingrich was speaker. In January 1995, when he assumed the leadership position, the gross national debt was $4.8 trillion. When he left four years later, it was $5.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion. As for annual deficits, he did not preside over a four-year period of balanced budgets. In the 1996 and 1997 budget years, the first two years he influenced as speaker, the government ran deficits. In 1998 and 1999, the government ran surpluses. Washington achieved surpluses for two years after that, making four consecutive years of black ink. But Gingrich only had a hand in the first two.
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