Bill Clinton: “From me, yes. But I want to do it, insofar as I can, with the Congress. As I said in the State of the Union Address, I…”

“From me, yes. But I want to do it, insofar as I can, with the Congress. As I said in the State of the Union Address, I think last time I bit off more than I could chew. They saw that, and then they decided to back away from their proposals and just take the political position they would kill anything we propose. And I think I made a mistake, but I think they did, too. And what I hope we ought to do now-- what I think we ought to do now, is to figure out a way to help Americans get more affordable health care and to solve this problem. And if we do it in the right way, we will continue to substantially lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid in the out-years. Let me say something that almost nobody has noticed in this budget I presented, and that is that this budget reflects $94 billion less in health care costs over the next 5 years than last year's budget. Why? Because of the increasing use of managed care in the Medicare program, because more seniors are voluntarily going into managed care programs in Medicaid, and because of the general efforts in both the private and in the public sector to bring down health care costs. Now, the reason it hasn't reduced the deficit $94 billion is that interest rate increases have added to the cost of carrying the debt. But we are lowering the cost of health care from what it was when I took office. And we can do that some more in a responsible, fair way. But we've got to do that together. I mean, we just--you know the Congress is a Republican majority Congress; I can't pass a health care bill unless they want to work with me on it.”