Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts - President Bill Clinton - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 3, 1993

This country is spending 15 percent of its income on health care. No other country is up to 10 percent. Only Canada is over 9 percent. So when people say--you'll hear it all--they'll say, oh, they're dealing with health care again, there they go again; it's all taxes and terrible and everything. You figure out what you're paying right now. Every one of you figure out what you're paying for health care, in taxes, premiums, uncompensated care that gets shifted on to your health insurance bills.

And so I say to you, we have got to face some other big fundamental issues. Not just this budget but how the Government is organized, what it delivers, whether it needs to deliver what it does, whether it needs to stop doing some things altogether. And then, what are we going to do about health care? We cannot go on ignoring the fundamental problems. If you've got it, it's still the best health care system in the world.

There are a lot of things about it that are wonderful. I want the delivery system to stay in private hands. I want people to still be able to pick their doctor. I want the best things about this health care system to stay just as it is. But you cannot look at it as long and hard as we have without concluding that we are spending a dime on the dollar on unnecessary paperwork and bureaucratic and regulatory expenses.

People say to me all the time, "You've got to do something about doctors' fees." Let me tell you just one little interest number. In 1980, the average doctor, working in a clinic, took home 75 percent of the money that came into the clinic. By 1990, that doctor was taking home 52 percent of the money coming into the clinic. Where did the rest of it go? Mostly to paper, to regulation, mostly from the proliferation of insurance policies, but some from what the Government did.

We can do better. We must. And we're going to bust a gut trying in this administration. We're going to do our best.

The last thing I want to say about this is, I ask for your scrutiny and your understanding as we get into the difficult business of political reform. I intend to ask the Congress to pass a tough campaign finance reform law. I intend to ask the Congress to adopt some restrictions on lobbying and some disclosure requirements that are not there now. We had the toughest ethics rules any President ever imposed on his appointee that prevent people from leaving my administration and going to work anytime in the near future to make money as lobbyists in the areas in which they worked for us.

These things are important. It may never be possible to be perfect, but it is important that we take these things on and that the voters of this country understand what is at stake as these matters begin to be debated.

And finally let me say--I think it's important to talk about today--I'm doing my best to restore a sense of real community in this country. As I said right when I came to you last year, we'd just seen Los Angeles racked by riots, and we were all talking about how we had to learn to live together without regard to race or income or region. I want to reiterate what I said to you a year ago: We don't have a person to waste in this country, and we're wasting them by the bucketful. We're letting people go, this way, that way, and the other way. And that's one of the reasons that I have said that we have to fight for a society that is not at all permissive but that is tolerant.