Remarks at a town meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 21, 1994

You may have seen in the press reports, my wife was out in Colorado yesterday and had huge crowds of students at Boulder, with big signs saying, "Give 'em health, Hillary." Make no mistake about it, some of the people who are giving me hell in Washington are doing it so I can't give you health. But I'm going to try to give you health and take whatever it is they want to give me in return for making sure you get what it is you're entitled to.

Now, I'm anxious to answer your questions. But let me just make a point or two about this. New Hampshire has a lot of strengths in terms of the health care you already have that many other States don't. And so you may say, "Well, what's in this for us?" You have, for example--only about 5 or 10 percent of your people don't have access, physical access, to good medical care. Most States as rural as New Hampshire have a far higher percentage of people who don't even have access. You have one of the finest immunization programs in the country. You've already done a lot of what the rest of the country needs to do in community-based mental health services. There are a lot of things that you can be very proud of. You have a higher percentage of your people who are insured and therefore, a lower percentage of your people who are uninsured.

So you say, "Well, what do we get out of this?" First, there will be no more uncompensated care, so the people who are providing health care will have some reimbursement because everybody will have insurance. Second, the people who are covered by Medicare but aren't poor enough to be on Medicaid, the kind of people I met at the Moe Arel Center, will, for the first time, have access to prescription medicine. And we'll phase in support for long-term care over and and above and in addition to nursing home, so that there will be some support for in-home care or community-based care.

This is very important. The fastest growing group of Americans are people over 80. And more and more people over 80 are quite vigorous and quite able to live good and full lives but may need some support. Over the long run, if you look at the population trends in this country--where we are going with our age groups--over the long run, we will save money if we provide a broader range of long-term care support and enable people to be as independent and as strong as they can for as long as possible. You will benefit from that.

The other thing I think is terribly important--I had a wrenching encounter at the hotel this morning, just before I left to come over here, where a woman came up to me with tears in her eyes, just crying, and she said, "My husband just lost his job, and we have preexisting medical conditions in our family and I do not know how we are going to get insurance." Even if you have insurance today, the only people who know they can't lose their insurance are people who work for employers that aren't going out of business and aren't ever going to lay anybody off. Everybody else is at some risk of losing their insurance, until you get old enough to get on the Medicare program. And that is a serious problem, because we have--I don't know how many people, I've met in this State--we've got millions of Americans who have someone in their family who's been sick before and have a preexisting condition and, therefore, either can't change jobs for fear of losing their health insurance, can't get insurance now because they've fallen through the cracks, or pay higher rates. So even here in New Hapshire, I assure you, there is something to be gained from having a system in which everyone always has some basic health insurance.