Bill Clinton: “No. First of all, the answer to your first question is none of us can totally perceive the future. What I can assure you…”

“No. First of all, the answer to your first question is none of us can totally perceive the future. What I can assure you of--and that's what I've said to Barry before--is that under this system, costs will rise much more slowly than they otherwise would. Let me tell you, we're at 14.2 percent of gross domestic product now. It is estimated that the United States will be at 20 percent of gross domestic product on the health care by the end of the decade and that no other country will be over 10. Canada might be a shade over 10. If we get to the point where we're spotting all of our competitors a dime on the dollar on health care, we're going to be in trouble sure enough. It's bad enough where it is. So costs of health care will continue to rise. What we're going to try to do is to bring the health care system's cost in line with inflation plus additions to population. That is, if the population gets older and more people need different kinds of health care, of course, that will go up. But what we can't afford to do is to let health care continue to go up at 2 or 3 times the rate of inflation. The answer to your second is, the national health board is not going to replace insurance companies, but insurance companies will--if the little ones want to continue to do this they'll have to find a way to join with one another to get into big bargaining units because we've got to let the small business people be in bigger units, otherwise they can't get their costs down. The national health board will be responsible for making sure that there is a reasonable budget to keep the costs in line and for making sure that we have developed reasonable quality standards to make sure that there is no erosion of quality of health care in the prescribed services. [A participant asked if small businesses should be limited to obtaining insurance from an alliance program only.]”