Bill Clinton: “I think you can do it if you control the cost of health care. You have to really--let me just--I don't want to get into…”

“I think you can do it if you control the cost of health care. You have to really--let me just--I don't want to get into one of these things that provoke a lot of cartoons about my policy wonk weakness, but we're at 14 percent of our income on health care now. The next most expensive health care system in the world is Canada's. It's at about 9.2 percent of income. That is a huge difference, massive. And yet, every other major country with which we compete provides some basic health care to everybody, something we don't do. So the answer to your question is, in my judgment, if we do this right over the next 8 years, you're going to see huge savings in tax dollars and even bigger savings, more than twice the savings, in private dollars that will free up hundreds of billions of dollars literally between now and the end of the decade to reinvest in economic growth and opportunity. In the short run, our tough call will be, how do you take the savings and phase in universal coverage, or should there be some other way to pay for that? We've got some short-term calls to make. But there's no question that in the medium term, 5 to 8 years, you're looking at massive savings with universal coverage, in both tax dollars and private sector dollars, if we do it right.”