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Thanks! | | -- Steve Freedkin , List Mgr. | |_____________________________________________________________| - THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary (St. Louis, Missouri) ______________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 24, 1994 REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT FUNDRAISING DINNER FOR MAJORITY LEADER RICHARD GEPHARDT Adams Mark Hotel St. Louis, Missouri 7:44 P.M. CDT THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. [...] After seven years of gridlock, we finally passed the Family and Medical Leave law. It's really important because it says most parents have to work, but the most important work of any society is parenting. So it ought to be possible to take a little time off when you've got a sick child or an ailing parent or when a baby is being born, without losing your job. Because we live in a country now where we all have to be good workers and good parents. And if we sacrifice one role for the other, we will never become what we ought to be. It took seven years to get that passed, but we broke gridlock with Dick Gephardt's leadership and passed the Family Leave Law and made our country a stronger country. (Applause.) [...] ... And we are working to try to redeem a pledge and a commitment that Harry Truman made 50 years ago, finally to provide assurance of health care to all working families in this country -- something we should have done when he was President of the United States of America. (Applause.) I want to talk just a moment about this health care issue because it is just like the deficit -- you just can't talk it down. And it is a difficult issue; it is not free of difficulty. But here are the facts. Of all the advanced countries in the world, only the United States does not provide health coverage to everybody -- everybody defined as 98 percent of us or more. Everybody else has done that. In our country, we cover about 83 percent of our people with health insurance or through a government program like Medicare for the senior citizens. No other country spends more than 10 percent of their income on health care. In our country, we spend 14 percent -- [correction:] 40 percent of our income[, more] than anybody else; but we can't figure out how to cover everybody. Not only that, the burden of paying for health care is wildly uneven and unfair. The government does not fully reimburse doctors and clinics and hospitals for health care for the poor and often for health care for senior citizens. Many others aren't insured at all and can't pay, but they get care. And all that cost is then shoved on to companies that do provide it. So these companies like McDonnell- Douglas pay health care not only for their own employees, but pay for the extra cost of those that take no care for themselves and make no investment. Small businesses in this country who are struggling to provide some health insurance for their employees pay rates that are, on average, 35 to 40 percent higher than bigger business or government does. So they're in the worst of all worlds. I was in Columbus, Ohio, the other day, and I met a woman who -- she and her husband ran a delicatessen where I had lunch. They had 20 full-time employees and 20 part-time employees. And she had had cancer five years before. And she said, "I am a living example of what is unfair about this system." She said, "We provide health insurance for our 20 full- time employees. And because I had cancer five years ago, we pay higher rates for our whole group. But I pay for them. And I resent the fact that my competitors don't do it. "On the other hand, I've got 20 part-time employees that I can't afford to cover, and I feel guilty that I don't do that. I've got it coming and going. But I simply can't afford it. If everybody had to do it I wouldn't be at a competitive disadvantage. The cost would actually be less than I'm paying now for me to cover my part-time employees if I could be in a big pool so that I could buy insurance on the same competitive basis larger companies do. Won't you please do something so I can do that?" On the other hand, in America -- let's take it the other way -- we have a lot of people who are small businesspeople who operate on very narrow profit margins. They're creating most of the jobs in this country, and they don't think they can afford anything else for health care. So what are we going to do? What we've done for 40 years is nothing. Except just to sort of add on one little program after another. In three years, in three years because of the rising cost of health care, we've lost three million people out of the health insurance system. Three million more people uncovered. In 1980, 87.5 percent of the American people were covered with health insurance. By 1993, only 83 percent of the American people were. We are going in reverse, and we're spending more while fewer are covered. Now, when I put out my program I went around and I listened to people talk about it. And they said, you've got too many rules in there; it's too bureaucratic; you need to make it more flexible; change it some. And I said, fine. The only thing I want to do is find a way to cover everybody and give small business, farmers, and self-employed people a break so they can buy rates -- insurance on a competitive basis and we can have some way of holding costs down without sacrificing quality. That's all I want to do. But if we don't do it, it will be just like this deficit -- or just like a hangnail. It won't get any easier. Sooner or later we're going to have to do this. We ought to do it now. We ought to do it now. (Applause.) Let me say, I want this to be as grass-roots a program as I can. The best -- most popular thing we've done when people know about it is national service, because the government provides the money and sets the goals, and people at the local level decide how to organize all these young people to solve problems. That's a lot of what we're trying to do with health care. I don't want the government to take it over. I want to leave the private insurance system in place. I want people at the state and local level to decide how to do it. But you have to have some rules that say how everybody is going to be covered, and some way of organizing folks so small business can get a break. You have to do that. And I say to you, I don't think we have a chance to do that if Dick Gephardt weren't so dedicated to it. (Applause.) And if we had about 10 more folks in both parties and both Houses that dedicated, there wouldn't be a chance that we wouldn't do it. And I wouldn't even have to give a speech about it tonight. But what we have to decide on health care and crime and welfare reform and all these other issues that face us is whether it's going to be a talking deal -- either way you get your dog back -- or whether it's going to be about doing something. Not trying to box our opponents into extreme positions and covering ourselves with labels, but looking at the reality. Back in the Middle Ages, the great Italian political philosopher, Machiavelli, said that there is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs than to change the established order of things. Because, he said, people who will be adversely affected by the change know it and they'll fight you like crazy. He didn't use those words, but I'm freely translating. (Laughter.) My Italian is not that bad. But he said, on the other hand, the people who will benefit are always somewhat uncertain about what the change will be, and therefore, they won't bring themselves into the fight with the same gusto as those who are afraid of the change. So it always is difficult to change. But we know that America is around here after 214 years, and more, because we always changed when we had to. Because we have this capacity to be faithful to our values and our Constitution and our institutions, but to change. And that's what he hired on for, and that's why I ran for president. [...] Thank you and God bless you. (Applause.) END 9:15 P.M. CDT