Bill Clinton: “Well, let me first of all say what you already know, which is that the Health Care Task Force that my wife is chairing…”

“Well, let me first of all say what you already know, which is that the Health Care Task Force that my wife is chairing is, at the moment, trying to finalize their recommendations so they can then take it to the doctors, to the hospitals, the nurses, to the business community, to the labor community, everybody, and try to let them evaluate it and then bring it back to me so I can introduce it in the Congress. I would like to just reshape what you said just a little bit. I agree we have the finest medicine in the world for people who can access it. I agree that we ought to keep a system where people can have some real choice of their doctors, particularly their primary providers whom they know. I agree that we need to keep medical care in private hands. I think that's all very important. It's a little more complicated than that just 15 percent have no health insurance. About 100,000 Americans a month lose their health insurance and either fall into the category of uncompensated care or onto the Government's Medicare and Medicaid rolls. We also have medical inflation rates at far higher than the world average, and we spend a third more of our income on health care than any other country, even though we don't insure some of our people. So what I think we need to do is to find ways to reorganize the insurance market so that you can't lose your health insurance if you've had somebody in your family sick and you've got a preexisting condition and you have to change jobs. I think that employers should bear some responsibility for their employees, but I think employees should pay some of their own health care costs, too, because if they don't, there's a tendency to overuse the system, which I'm sure you've seen. It's very important to point out that everybody gets, I'm sure you would acknowledge, everybody gets health care in this country, but it's too late, too expensive, and often at the emergency room. And if the employers who don't do anything for their employees say, well, they shouldn't have to, the truth is that those who do are paying the bill, as you know. Employers who provide health insurance are paying not only for their employees but everybody else, too. And their cost goes up. So what I want to do is to see a system where we phase in the requirements on employers who don't cover their employees in very reasonable way, where the Government basically provides for the nonemployed uninsured and where we have insurance reforms that will simplify billing and regulation and dramatically reduce your paperwork burden. The average doctor--let me just say another thing--a lot of people complain to me and say, ``Well, these doctor fees are going up so fast.'' You need to know that in 1980--let me just say this, this is real important--in 1980, the average doctor took home 75 percent of all the income that he or she generated into a clinic. In 1992, that figure is down to 52 percent. Twenty-three cents on the dollar gone, mostly to bureaucracy and paperwork and regulation and insurance costs, right?”