Bill Clinton: “About a third. So I just want to try to lay this out, because actually you are in--because your restaurant is small, we…”

“About a third. So I just want to try to lay this out, because actually you are in--because your restaurant is small, we estimate that you would qualify for the maximum discount, and you could actually insure your employees for about what you're paying now for your family under our program, because you'd go into a big buying pool and because you'd be eligible for a discount because you're a very small business. But it's not fair to say that all food service workers would be like you, all food service, because there are a lot of restaurants that have 100 employees or 150 employees, so they don't qualify for discounts. They would have to pay the 7.9 percent. So in your case, if our plan were to pass, we think that there would be no increase for you or just absolutely minimum, because you would qualify for the small business discount to the maximum degree. But let's say you had a restaurant of 100 employees or 200 employees, some of them have 200 employees, with a lot of part-timers. You would only pay for the part-timers now while they were actually working. You'd have no responsibility when they don't work for you. At 7.9 percent--then the real cost, additional cost of doing business would be one-third of that because the payroll is a third of total cost or something less than 3 percent. And that's what we have to figure out, to what extent could all restaurants pass that on if they were all in the same boat, if they were all treated the same way? Would we change our habits, our eating habits, if our food prices went up that much? Would more of us eat at home? I mean, these are the kinds of questions that it's hard to answer. But my instinct is that if all the competitors in this business were treated the same way, that most of us have ingrained habits of eating out because we have more and more families where both the man and the woman are working and working longer hours, and I think it's doubtful that habits would change within that range, where the maximum increase--if 100 percent of it were passed on to the customers, which it might not be--was still less than 3 percent. In Regina's case it wouldn't happen that way, but it would in a case of a cafeteria with 150 employees, if our plan passed just as it is, with the 80-20 match. But for the smaller businesses, again I would say, families still have to pay too much for their health insurance if they have to buy them as individual families. So you would get a 100 percent deduction instead of a 25 percent deduction for the premium you pay, plus a discount. So you'd be able to insure your employees for about what you're paying now. Let's go on to Alonzo Harrison, who runs a construction company, and let him talk about his situation, because this again is a, I think, a pretty typical small business situation where he'd get some discount but would still have to pay more. [Alonzo Harrison explained that he could not afford to provide health insurance for his employees but tried to help them find it at a reasonable cost. He discussed his medical expenses for an illness that occurred during a trip to Washington, DC.]”