Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. There's a gentleman back there in the corner. While you're passing the microphone back, I just want…”

“Thank you very much. There's a gentleman back there in the corner. While you're passing the microphone back, I just want to sort of support that and say that, if you look at the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill which passed the Senate 100 to 0--which is the sort of thing we ought to be doing in this country, I mean, obviously we've got a manifest need like that. It doesn't solve all the problems, but at least it will make portability the rule rather than the exception, and it will make available insurance, even if it's expensive now, for people who have had someone in their family who is ill. And then the next big challenge will be to make sure that those of you who are in a tough margin and, particularly, smaller businesses are able to get into really, really large pools of purchasers so that people who have a preexisting condition don't have to get soaked on their premiums because the impact on everybody else is so negligible. And we'll just have to do this one step at a time, but we've got to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill first so that we can get to that next step. And when we do, I think it will make a huge difference in stabilizing the whole work situation for people in these smaller companies and where that job is the first stop on the way to, hopefully, an even better future. Thank you very much for what you said. Yes, sir. [A participant said that some corporations blamed the financial markets for the need to downsize and asked if it would be possible to create new financial instruments to take into account certain social goals.]”