Bill Clinton: “Yes. Let me first say what was said here is absolutely right. As all of you know who have ever had a family member…”

“Yes. Let me first say what was said here is absolutely right. As all of you know who have ever had a family member affected by this, if you're older and you go to a hospital, you can get care covered by your policies or by Medicare. If you go to a nursing home, you basically have to spend yourself into abject poverty to get any benefits. And as a result of that, we've got a lot of folks in this country who are in trouble. Also, the least expensive and best way to care for people might be in some community-based setting or at home, and there are relatively limited coverages available for long-term care services. And Alzheimer's is a particular example of this because a lot of people want to care for their loved ones at home, or want them to be able to stay at home for as long as possible, but can't get any help in that regard. I'll come back to the research issue in a moment. The way this program will work, the long-term care program, is that we will permit home and community-based care to be reimbursed just like nursing home care number one. Number two, the programs will not be means-tested. That is, if people have the ability to pay something, they'll be asked to pay, but they won't be cut out of the program because their income is above a certain amount. So that solves the whole Medicare-Medicaid differential issue. Number three, in order to be eligible for Medicaid nursing home care today you have to have--there's a spend down limit of $2,000. You can only have $2,000 in assets to be eligible for 100 percent coverage under Medicaid. We're going to raise that to $12,000. And people who are in Medicaid funding in nursing homes--funded nursing homes--only get $30 a month in spending money, $30 a month. In 1977, when I entered public life and became an advocate for people in nursing homes, they got $25 a month. You can imagine--so in other words, in effect, people are getting less than half as much per month as they did in 1977. We propose to raise that to $100 which will take it back about to its 1972 levels. So I think these things will work if we also provide better regulation and some tax preference for private long-term care insurance to supplement whatever people want or get from our Government program. But this long-term care issue is a very big issue. Keep in mind, again, elderly people are the fastest growing group of our population. Most people would prefer not to be in an institutional setting if they can be cared for at home or in a community setting. And again, I will say to you, this is another example where sometimes we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Yes, it will cost more money to start this program, but over the long run, 20 years from now our health care system in the aggregate will be cheaper because we provide a wider range of care options and we don't shove everybody into the most expensive option to get any help at all. So that's how that will work. Now, on the Alzheimer's question in particular, the way this system of funding works, we are going to develop a stream of funding that will increase our investment in medical research of all kinds, including research in the care and treatment of Alzheimer's. So you'll get more medical research. I will say again, we have been driven here not to mess up what is right with American medicine and American health care, we want to enhance what is right and only focus on what is wrong in trying to deal with it.”