Remarks to Health Security Express participants

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, August 8, 1994

August 3, 1994

The President. My fellow Americans, Congress has to decide whether it's going to listen to the insurance companies or to Jan Cox's last wish.

We all know what the problem is here. You've just ridden a bus across the country, seeing real people who are just working hard, making the best they can of their lives, wanting a decent break. Those of you who have had these kinds of personal experiences that Daniel and Carolyn and John talked about can't figure out why we spend more than anybody else on health care, cover fewer people than any other country, and get poorer health results. It is because organized, intense, discrete minority interests are doing very well on a system that costs more than any other country's and covers fewer people. And every time you try to change it, they say, well, the world will come to an end.

Well, like Hillary said, we ran for this job, along with Vice President and Mrs. Gore, because maybe we could be the home office of the "American association of ordinary citizens." That's what we wanted to do. And every time we try to make a change, that's what they said.

We showed up here; the deficit was going up, and the economy was going down. And I put together a plan, and I urged the people on the other side to work with me. And they said, "No, if we vote for this, the sky will fall, the economy will collapse. And so we'll all vote against it and call it a big tax increase."

But the truth is the plan cut spending, raised taxes on the richest 1 1/2 percent of Americans, gave 15 million working people a tax cut; thanks to the Secretary of Education, gave 20 million Americans an opportunity to refinance their college loans at a lower interest rate. And, lo and behold, it produced a drop in unemployment and 3.8 million new jobs, and the sky didn't fall. Now the deficit's going down, and the economy's coming up. But it's hard to overcome these organized, intense interests.

We had a different sort of fight over the big trade battle last year over on NAFTA. They said, "If you do this, the economy will collapse." But lo and behold, the Congress, this time with a bipartisan effort, passed NAFTA, and we're exporting 5 times as many cars to Mexico as we were last year. They're our biggest, most growing market.

Change is hard up here, because even though most Members of Congress were once just like you, when they get up here they're a long way from home, and they know that you and the President are presented to the folks back home partly through the rhetoric and the money spent by organized, intense minority interests.

And somehow, some way, this fight has got to be about Daniel Lumley and Carolyn Mosley and John and Jan cox. That's what it's got to be about. It's got to be about my friend Justin Dart, sitting back there, and all the Americans with disabilities who could be in the work force, making money, paying taxes, contributing to our future, if they could just get health insurance while they're in the work force; all the nurses who hired on to help people get well, and instead spend all their time calling insurance companies to try to figure out if this or that procedure can be done by the doctor in the first place. Goodness only knows how many people we employ in this country that would be working more productively in any other country. We have to put hundreds of thousands of people to work every day to figure out who's not covered or what's not covered in an insurance policy. There's not anybody else in the world spending their time and spinning their wheels, putting people to work asking them to spend their entire working life reading the fine print of insurance policies to see what is not covered. Can you imagine a more unsatisfying thing to do with your life?

Lee Brown, our drug policy leader, do you know why he's here today? Because if we could pass health insurance for all Americans, it would include drug treatment for all Americans. Now, he's a policeman; he spent all of his life trying to lower crime and fight criminals, be tough on law and order. But he learned as a police officer that there are a lot of people in trouble with drug and alcohol abuse, and they need treatment. And we'd save billions and billions of dollars.

And it's not like we don't know what to do. Twenty years ago, Hawaii said, everybody here is going to get insurance; we're going to have employers and employees cover their health insurance. And if you've never been to Hawaii--I hope you get to go someday; it's a wonderful place--but everything there is more expensive than any place else because it's way out on an island somewhere, everything except health care, where the premiums for small business are 30 percent below the national average because everybody pays and no one runs away and everybody is covered.

And you ought to be taken care of, whether you're a young man riding a motorcycle in the prime of your life or a young woman giving yourself to nursing or a man following a religious mission to work at a Christian radio station or any other thing. It just ought to be that way.