Bill Clinton: “Let me try to answer your first question and then your second question. First of all, somewhere around 15 percent are…”

“Let me try to answer your first question and then your second question. First of all, somewhere around 15 percent are not insured. But the problem is more serious than that in two ways. A whole lot of people, principally folks who work for smaller business, have very limited insurance, that is, very high deductibles or copays or limited benefits. And an enormous number of people are at risk of losing their insurance, so that we are actually adding to the pool of permanently uninsured people about 100,000 people a month. Therefore, we are going to leave a lot of people alone. There will be a lot of people, for example, who will keep the same benefits that they have. If they have the same or better benefits or their employers pay the same or bigger contribution, they'll be left alone. And that's a huge number of people. So there will be an awful lot of people that won't be affected by that in that sense. But we have to set up a system that stops this hemorrhaging and gives small businesses and self-employed people the right to buy insurance on the same terms that big business and Government can. So I think that's an answer to that. With regard to your other question, the truth is that most doctors and hospitals contribute far more than one percent of their time and earnings now because when people don't have insurance, they do eventually get health care. But they get it when they're too sick and they show up at the emergency room; they get wildly expensive care. And then they either absorb it, that is, the doctors, the nurses, the hospitals either eat it, or they pass it along to all the rest of you, so you wind up paying more than you otherwise would for your own health care because others don't do it. But I think that basically, we are going to leave as many people alone as we can while trying to minimize the chance that anyone can ever lose their insurance again. [A participant with an artificial limb asked if she would receive the same quality care under the plan, even if she happened to lose her job.]”