Bill Clinton: “Bless you. Let me also say that in regard to the mental health comment you made that in addition to Rosalynn Carter and…”

“Bless you. Let me also say that in regard to the mental health comment you made that in addition to Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford, that position is most strongly urged in our administration by Tipper Gore, who is a real mental health advocate and has done a wonderful job on this issue. Let me explain what the problem is to everybody else. This health care plan basically has a guaranteed set of benefits, which means that every plan after this, if you have a plan that gives these benefits or gives more, you won't be affected. If you don't have any insurance or your insurance doesn't provide some of these benefits, then the benefits would have to be included if the bill passes. The principal new things we do that oftentimes aren't in health care plans are primary and preventive things, tests like cholesterol tests or mammograms or things like that, things that we believe save a lot of money over the long run, primary and preventive care. We also begin to phase in alternatives to nursing home and long-term care, as I said. And we phase in full parity for mental health benefits, as she noted, up to the year 2000. The mental health community says, and by the way, I think they're probably right, that you ought to start with full mental health coverage as soon as all other coverage is phased in. You know, if it takes 2 or 3 or 4 years, whenever you put all the other stuff in, put mental health in right then and you will probably save money on it. Now, let me just explain what the problem is, because, in principle, I agree with you. But any bill I pass--any bill the Congress passes, as Congressman Swett can explain, has to have a price tag on it that has been certified by the bipartisan or nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. They have to say, ``Here's how much the bill will cost, here's how it's going to be paid for, and here's why it won't increase the deficit.'' That's the law under which we're operating now. The problem is that under the budget rules, no one knows--we know how much mental coverage will cost, but we don't know how much it will save. So, to try to get full parity, we went--I didn't--the First Lady and her group went to 10 different actuaries to try to get the best possible figures we could get on what mental health coverage would cost. And we couldn't ever get a consensus that the Congressional Budget Office would buy. I'm not trying to paint them as the bad guys, by the way. They're not the bad guys; they just don't know. So what we may have to do is to start off with the mental health benefits phased in, then show what the costs are of the new things we're doing, and if they're lower than they're projected to be, then we can accelerate the time in which the full coverage comes in. That's the only possibility that I see right now because of the budgetary problem we have. And this is a problem, by the way, we face in lots of other areas where we're doing something we know will have a good benefit, but we can't prove it. I'll give you another example so it might be clearer to you. When we passed the North American Free Trade Agreement for trade with Mexico, everybody said it would increase trade with Mexico and jobs in the short run. Everybody said that. Even the people that weren't for it thought it would increase jobs in the short run. But we had to count it as a net negative for the budget because we had to reduce tariffs which weren't coming in. So we counted all the losses; we could count no estimated gains from increasing sales. So if some company from New Hampshire sells more in Mexico, it earns more money and pays more Federal income tax, right? We couldn't count any of the estimated increase in Federal income tax; we had to count all the losses. That's what happened in mental health, which is the problem I'm facing. If we can figure out a way around it, we'll try to accelerate the coverage. But it's a budgetary problem. You're absolutely right. It has to be done, but better it be done in 2000 than not at all. And I'll try to figure out how to do it quicker. Who's got the mikes here in this column here? Let's do a couple here. Unemployment”