Bill Clinton: “Good morning. The Vice President and I have just finished a good meeting with Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt.…”

“Good morning. The Vice President and I have just finished a good meeting with Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt. We all agree that the message from the American people in the last election is clear--that they want us to pursue progress over partisanship and to find unity over division. And we talked about how best to start that process. We believe the best way to start is by taking up the Patients' Bill of Rights, the legislation that would guarantee quality health care to Americans without regard to whether they are in managed care plans or not and would assure that medical decisions are made by doctors, not by accountants. In the last session of Congress, that bill lost by only five votes in the House, and we now have five more Democrats coming to the House. It came very close to passing in the United States Senate. It need not be a partisan issue. Indeed, a cosponsor of the Patients' Bill of Rights in the House is Congressman Greg Ganske from Iowa, a Republican physician who has spoken very eloquently about the need for this legislation. So what we want to do is to reach out to like-minded people in the other party to try to heed the admonition of the American people and the direction that we certainly agree we ought to take and get to work together. We're looking forward to it, and this is where we think we should begin. 1998 Election Results and Impeachment Inquiry”