Bill Clinton: “Well, first, for part-time workers who work over 10 hours a week, the full share would not be due unless people worked…”

“Well, first, for part-time workers who work over 10 hours a week, the full share would not be due unless people worked 30 hours a week. If it's between 10 and 30, it's less than the full share, but some contribution would be required. This is a general problem, by the way. We had to find a way to cover part-time workers. But some employers, perhaps not in the newspaper industry, but some employers, let's say they have a permanent payroll of more or less 500, they may have 6,000 part-time employees coming in and out, and they're worried about the bookkeeping problems with this. So we're, frankly, looking for a way to deal with this that is fair, but we know we have to find some way, given how many part-time workers there are in this country, to find the coverage for part-time workers. And so we asked for a pro rata contribution from the employer but not a full contribution for the part-time workers. On the other issue, we had a lot of debates about this because a lot of families have been in the situation over time--our family has been-- where you have fairly decent health insurance policies that you can access at either place, but if you choose, you only buy one at one place. And I understand what you're saying there. The problem that we run up against is if you require all employers to make a contribution and employees to match, or at least you give them the right to require their employees to pay the match, which most people do anyway, then will it be fair to one small business as compared to another if just by the luck of the draw the families always choose to use one plan over another? We're trying to work through that. And the reason we adopted the plan that the idea that everybody was paid we thought under those circumstances, one would pay as an individual so that the premiums would be quite a bit lower, but it would avoid putting some businesses at a dramatic competitive disadvantage to others. Again, that was one of the tough issues in this whole debate. If you have an idea about it, I would urge you to get in touch with our health care task force. We tried to work through it in a way that wouldn't put any group of businesses or individual business at a disadvantage compared to others. And that's why we wound up with that approach, giving people the option to, in effect, pay lower rates at each place and pay something, than pay a much higher rate at one place and nothing at all at another.”