Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much, Mayor, and all my good friends in Queens. It's great to be back in this diner again. We had a…”

“Thank you very much, Mayor, and all my good friends in Queens. It's great to be back in this diner again. We had a terrific--was anybody here when I was here before? Well, Congressman Manton was, and Lowey was here, and you were here, and you were here when I was here before. We had a great time here. A lot of you were here. Didn't we, Antonio? We had a great time. And I felt so good about it, I brought you a cap from my food service. [Laughter] You can wear it here. There you go. I came to this place during the primary as an example of a new small business and the kind of economic opportunity that I hope to support as President. In the last several months I've had the opportunity to work with the Members of Congress here present: Gary Ackerman, Tom Manton, Anita Lowey. Anybody else here from the House? I don't think so. And we've done a lot of things that I think will help the economy. We have passed the biggest deficit reduction program in history. We have record- low interest rates. We have created some empowerment zones that will help some distressed areas of our biggest cities and some of our rural areas to generate new private sector investment like this. We are pushing through some banking reforms that will make available financial institutions whose primary mission is to loan money to new small businesses, like this one was just a year or so ago. We are trying, in other words, to help to create an economy which will be connected to the future, and which people who want to work hard can win. We are revolutionizing a lot of the educational programs of the National Government. The student loan program has been completely rewritten to provide longer term, lower interest rate student loans on better repayment terms so that young people can pay them back as a percentage of their income, no matter how much they have to borrow. We passed a national service program to allow tens of thousands of our young people to work in community programs to pay off their college loans. So we are moving ahead to create tomorrow's economy and to try to help our people adjust to it. But one of the things that I have learned--and the reason this health care debate is so important is that it is absolutely impossible to get people to have the courage to change unless first they can be secure in their own circumstances. If you think about it, every one of you in your own personal life know that is true. Look at any child you raise up. A child, if you want a child to change his or her behavior, to try something new, the more personally secure the child is, the more the child is willing to try to do something new and different, to believe that you can change and win. The more insecure people are, the more focused they are on just surviving from day to day, the more difficult that is. The hard truth is that this country has seen a very long period of time, about 20 years, when most working people have gotten steadily more insecure. We have, according to your senior Senator Pat Moynihan, seen almost 30 years of steady deterioration in the supports the children have in their family units. And we are now facing a great challenge in this country: How can we get the security people need so that people will have the courage to change as we move to the 21st century? I've really thought a lot about that. That's at the core of the crime bill that's been introduced into the Congress, which will provide 50,000 of the 100,000 more police officers I want to put on the streets--will pass at long last the Brady bill, very important in New York. The Mayor told me you confiscate thousands of weapons here every year and 90 percent of them come from another State. So we've got to pass the Brady bill. And I hope that before the year's out I will have a chance to vote on one of the number of bills in the Congress now which would ban assault weapons and take them out of the hands of teenagers in our cities and give us a chance to have a saner and safer place. That's one part of this. I want to compliment Mayor Dinkins. His program will have increased the size of the New York City police force up about 20 percent when it is completed. And New York City is one of the few big cities in America which is reporting now, for 2 years in a row, a decline in all seven major categories of crime. That's something you can be proud of. Not very many cities have done it, and you should be proud of it. If you want people to be more secure you have to support families. And we have to make it possible for people to succeed as workers and as parents, because most parents have to work. And we have waited too long in this country to do this. That was at the heart of our party's determination, to overcome the reluctance of the last 4 years and pass the family and medical leave bill. I want to tell you a story. I got up this morning--and my mother spent the night with me in the White House last night, and so I got my mother and my daughter and my wife up and my stepfather, and we were all bustling around on Sunday morning. And then I went out for my morning run, and when I came back in I noticed in the bottom floor of the White House a family getting a personal tour on Sunday morning--the father, the mother, and three children--three daughters, one of these young daughters desperately ill with cancer. And she had been in one of these Make-a-Wish programs, and her wish was to come to the White House and see the President. So they brought her on Sunday morning so she could see the helicopter take off as I came up here. And I got to sit and visit with her a long time. But the father of that child looked at me and he said, ``My daughter has been sick a long time. And I don't know what I would have done without the family and medical leave law. I still have a job because you passed that law. Don't let anybody ever tell you it was bad for the economy.'' The Members of Congress here present voted for a bill to change the tax laws so that people who work with children on lower incomes, lower wages, will be lifted above the poverty line as they work and raise their children, so that the tax system won't tax people into poverty, it will lift them out of it--the most sweeping piece of economic reform in at least two decades. Not very much noticed, but you will see it in tens of thousands of people in Queens who in the coming year will get a reduction in their income tax bill because they work for modest wages and they have children in their homes. We've got to try to do that. But here's why we came here today. If we do all of these things, and we don't fix the health care system, we will not restore security to American life. We won't be supporting families who are trying to raise their children or take care of their parents. And we won't give people the kind of inner strength and self-confidence they need to face a world that is smaller and smaller and smaller, to support expanded trade, to support new investments in new technologies, to support the kind of things I'm going to talk about at the United Nations tomorrow. This health care issue is uniquely a deeply personal one for every individual and every family and a massive national issue for the United States. It is inconceivable that we spend 35 to 40 percent more of our income on health care than any other country and we still have 37 million people uninsured; that in any given 2-year period, one in four people will be without adequate insurance. This morning I was out for my morning run. This handsome young man runs by me, he says, ``Mr. President, do you mind if I run with you awhile?'' And I told him, not if he would slow down, I didn't. So he turned around, we're running along together, and he was an actor there involved in a play. And he said, ``My wife is expecting a baby, and we're going to have our first child in April. And I'm an actor. I work as hard as I can, but my work is not constant. And every year I am not sure whether I can have health insurance. You've got to pass this program.'' Just a guy running along The Mall, like a lot of these people who are going to talk to us today. We received 700,000 letters, the First Lady and her task force and I. We're still getting about 10,000 letters a week on health care alone. Let me say, I suppose most of you either saw the address I made to Congress or the Nightline show where I answered questions for so long that everybody who watched the whole program was sleepy the next day. But I want to just reiterate one or two things real quickly. First of all, the most important thing we can do with this health care system to fix it is to keep what's right, fix what's wrong, but guarantee the benefits of it to all Americans. We are the only major country in the world where people don't have the security of knowing that they have comprehensive health care that can't be taken away if you lose your job or someone in your family gets sick or something else hap- pens. We have got to give that sense of security. We've got to fix what is wrong and keep what is right. What's right about the system? High quality, consumer choice. Our plan keeps them both and, in fact, increases quality by providing preventive and primary services that will save money over the long run and improve the quality of health care and increases choice for most Americans who today increasingly have only one choice of how they get their health care. What's wrong with the health care system? Well, it costs too much, it's too complicated, and it doesn't promote personal responsibility for every American. And it has no security. There is not a soul in this country that can't lose his or her health care, nobody. So that's what is wrong with it. Our system saves money without sacrificing quality, simplifies the system, which will elate the doctors and nurses and the people who have had to fool with it for years. We are now hiring clerical workers at 4 times the rate we are adding direct care providers in most hospitals in this country. It introduces more responsibility because it asks every employer and every employee to do what the vast majority of employers and employees are doing now, and it rewards good behavior. And finally, it provides security to everybody. My dream is that before the Congress goes home, and after the finish of its business next year, it will pass a bill to give a security card like this to every American, so that no matter where you are and what happens to you, or whether you lose your job or whether someone in your family gets sick, you'll always be able to get health care. Now, I know a lot of people are skeptical that this can be done. But I just ask you to remember a couple of basic facts: We are already spending 40 percent more than anybody else. We are spending at least 10 cents on the dollar in unnecessary nonhealth-related paperwork that no other country in the world is spending. Nobody. And if we have a system like the one we've outlined, that will provide discounts to small business and low-wage workers--so that a place like this, a great place, can provide some health insurance without running the risk of going broke because when businesses start and they have just a few employees, they can't all afford the market rate, and so we give them discounts to them--we can get this done. I just don't believe that we have to go on for another year or 5 years or 10 years being the only nation in the world that can't figure out how to give health care to everybody. I don't believe that. And I don't think you believe that. So today we're here in Queens to hear from some of the people who wrote us from New York. A lot of you wrote us letters, but I'm going to call on eight people--and get rid of this so we can just have a conversation--who represent what I think may be the four biggest obstacles to health care security, that cause people to lose their health insurance. So we're going to first talk about the curse of preexisting conditions that you want health insurance. And the first person who's going to talk about the letter that she wrote to us is Linda Haftel. Where are you, Linda? [Ms. Haftel, who was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, described her fear of losing her health insurance.]”