Bill Clinton: “Thank you, and good morning. I would like to begin by saying I am honored to be here. I thank all of you for coming.…”

“Thank you, and good morning. I would like to begin by saying I am honored to be here. I thank all of you for coming. Somebody fell out of the chair--are you all right? [Laughter] I wish I had a nickel for every time I've done that. [Laughter] You okay now? Good. Well, this is appropriate. I want to thank your attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, for joining us; and Mayor Hollister, the State legislators, county commissioners, and city council members who are here. And I thank President Anderson of the Lansing Community College for making me feel so welcome here. I love community colleges, and I'm going to go visit with some of the students after I finish here, and I'm going to tell them they should also be for this. The younger they are, the more strongly they should feel about this, what we're trying to do here. I would like to thank our sponsors today, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare--the president Martha McSteen; the executive vice president, Max Richtman, are here. I thank the National Council of Senior Citizens and their executive director, Steve Protulis, who is here; the Older Women's League National Board president, Betty Lee Ongley; Judith Lee of the Older Women's League; John D'Agistino of the Michigan State Council of Senior Citizens. I'd also like to thank in her absence your Congresswoman, Debbie Stabenow, who was going to come with me today, but they're voting on an issue which is very critical to whether we can do what I hope to do with Medicare. But she has been a wonderful supporter of our efforts to preserve Medicare and to add the prescription drug benefit. And I know she did a study here in this district on seniors' prescription drug options and cost, and some of you may have been responsible for the position she is now taking in Washington. But I am very, very grateful for it. And I know Debbie's mother, Ann Greer, is here. So I thank her for coming. And let me say to all of you--and I want to thank Jane for doing this. You know, I met her about 3 minutes ago, and I--she's got to come out here with me and do this program. And I think the odds are she'll do better than I will. [Laughter] So I'm not worried. Let me say, today I want to have this opportunity to talk with all of you--we have people of all ages here--about the great national debate going on not only in Washington but in our country, a debate that we never thought we'd be having. You know, I came to Lansing first when I was running for President in 1992, and the people of Michigan have been very good to me and to Hillary and to Vice President and Mrs. Gore. I'm very grateful for that. But it occurred to me if I had come here in '92, and I'd say, ``I want you to support me because if you do we've got a $290 billion deficit today, but I'll be back here in 6 years, and we'll talk about what to do with the surplus.'' Now, I think it's fair to say that if I had said that people would have said, ``He seems like a nice young man, but he's terribly out of touch''--[laughter]--``he doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. This guy is too far gone to have this job.'' But that's what we're doing here. Six and a half years ago, Michigan's unemployment rate was 7.4 percent. Today it's 3.8 percent. We've gone from a $209 billion deficit to a $99 billion surplus. And we have done it with a strategy that focused on cutting the deficit, balancing the budget, eliminating unnecessary spending, but continuing to invest in education and training. For example, we've almost doubled our investment in education and training in the last 6 years while we have cut hundreds of programs and reduced the size of the Federal Government to its smallest point since 1962, when President Kennedy was in office. So I think that's very important. And the tax relief which has been given in the last 6 years is focused on families and education. I asked the president of this college when I came in, I asked him what the tuition was, because now our HOPE scholarship tax credit gives a $1,500-a-year tax credit to virtually all the students in our country. And that makes community college free, or nearly free, to virtually all the students in community colleges in our country. It's an important thing. But we've worked hard, and the American people have worked hard. Now we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, with 19 million new jobs. We have the lowest minority unemployment rates ever recorded. And we have to ask ourselves, we've worked very hard as a country for this; what are we going to do with it? And I have argued that, at a minimum, we ought to meet our biggest challenges: the aging of America, the obligation to keep the economy going, and the obligation to educate and prepare our children for the 21st century. Today we're going to talk primarily about the aging of America and Medicare. But I want to emphasize what a challenge that is. The number of people over 65 will double between now and the year 2030--will double. The fastest-growing group of people in the United States in percentage terms are people over 80. Any American today who lives to be 65 has a life expectancy of about 82. Children being born today, when you take into account all of the things that can happen--illness, accident, crime, everything--have a life expectancy of 77 from birth now. We expect to unlock the genetic code with the human genome project in the next 3 to 4 years, and it then will become normal for a young mother taking a baby home from the hospital to have a genetic map of that baby's body, which will be a predictor of that baby's future health. It will be troubling in some ways. It will say, well, this young baby girl has a strong predisposition to breast cancer. But it will enable you to get treatment, to follow a diet, to do other things which will minimize those risks; will say, this young boy is highly likely to have heart disease at an earlier-than-normal time, but it will enable us to prepare our children from birth to avert those problems. So this is a very important thing. The first thing I want to say to all of you--and those of you who are in the senior citizens' groups will identify with this--this is a high-class problem we have. This is a problem, the aging of America, that is a high-class problem. It means we're living longer and better. I wish all of our problems were like this. It has such--a sort of a happy aspect to them. But it does mean that there will be new challenges for our country, and it means, among other things, that we'll have, percentage-wise, relatively fewer people working and more people drawing Social Security and Medicare. When you look at the Social Security system, it's slated to run out of money in about 34, 35 years. It ought to have a much longer life expectancy than that. Everybody--it's fine for the next 35 years, but I've offered a plan to increase the life of the Social Security Trust Fund for at least 54 years and to go further if the Congress will go with me. I have offered a plan to increase--when I became President, the Medicare Trust Fund was slated to go broke this year. And we took some very tough actions in 1993 and again in 1997 to lengthen the life of the Trust Fund--actions which, I might add, most hospitals with significant Medicare caseloads and teaching hospitals which deal with a lot of poor folks believe went far too far. And we're going to have to give some money back to those hospitals in Michigan and throughout the country. But we now have 15 years on the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. Under my proposal, we would take it out to 2027, and that will give plenty of time for future Congresses and Presidents to deal with whatever challenges develop in the Medicare program after that. Now, to do that and to do it without cutting our commitment to education, to biomedical research, to national defense, we have to devote most of the surplus to Social Security and Medicare. We will still have funds for a substantial tax cut but not as big as the one being offered in Washington today, which spends all the non-Social Security tax surplus funds on a tax cut. I believe the wise thing to do is to take care of the 21st century challenge of the aging of America, to do it in a way that does not require us to walk away from the education of our children; and under my plan, because we would save most of the surplus, the side benefit we'd get is that in 15 years we could actually take the United States of America out of debt for the first time since 1835. Now, why is that important--and it's more important, I would argue, than at any time in my lifetime. I was raised to believe that a certain amount of debt for a country was healthy; that just like businesses are always borrowing money to invest in new business, a certain amount of debt was healthy. The structural deficit has been terrible. The idea that we quadrupled the debt in 12 years was an awful idea, because we were borrowing money just to pay the bills. But I'd like to ask you all to think about this, because I don't think most Americans have focused on this part of the plan, the idea of being debt-free. We live in a global economy. Money can travel across national borders literally at the speed of light. We just move it around in accounts. Interest rates are set, therefore, in a global context. If we become debt-free and we, therefore, don't borrow any money in America just to fund the Government, that means everybody else's interest rates will be lower. That means for businesses, lower business borrowing rates; it means more businesses, more jobs, easier to raise wages. For families it means lower home mortgage rates, lower credit card payment rates, lower car payment rates, lower college loan rates. It means that we will secure the economic strength of America in ways that are unimaginable to us now. It means that if other parts of the world get in trouble, the way Asia did a couple of years ago, we'll be less vulnerable. And the people that are in trouble and need to borrow money will be able to get it at lower interest rates, and they'll get up and go on again and be able to do business with us again. This is a very good thing to do. But it can only be done if we set aside the vast majority of the surplus to fix Social Security and Medicare. You can still have a tax cut, focused on helping families save for their retirement or any number of the other things that have been discussed within the range we can afford; focused on helping people pay for long-term care; focused on helping working families pay for child care; and, I would hope, focused on helping us modernize our schools for the 21st century and giving business people big incentives to invest in the small towns, rural areas, urban neighborhoods, and Indian reservations that still haven't gotten any new business investment in this recovery of ours. But the fundamental decision is, are we going to do these things? Now, there does seem to be agreement in Washington--let's start with the good news--there does seem to be an agreement in Washington that we should set aside the portion of the surplus produced by your Social Security tax payments for Social Security. And if that, in fact, happens, under the way that the Republicans and the Democrats have agreed on so far, we will pay down the debt--we will continue to pay down the debt, but we won't pay it off. And we won't extend the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, as I would under my plan. But still, that's something. There is yet no agreement in Washington over setting aside a significant portion of the surplus to save and modernize Medicare. So today we're here to talk about that. But I wanted you to have a feeling for how the Medicare proposal fits into the proposal to save Social Security, to keep investing in education, to have a modest tax cut, and to make the country debt free. I want you to think about it, because the big debate is, what are we going to do with the surplus? And I don't even agree with the timing of what's going on in Washington. I don't think we should even be talking about the tax cut until we figure out what it costs to save Social Security, what it costs to save and modernize Medicare, what we have to do to keep the Government going. How would you feel--now, one of my staff members, who happens to be from Michigan, said to me the other day, this is kind of like a family sitting around the kitchen table and said, ``Let's plan the fancy vacation of our dreams and then talk about how we're going to make the mortgage payment.'' [Laughter] ``Hope we've got enough left over.'' So that's where we are. To evaluate whether you agree or not, we need to talk about what needs to be done about Medicare. So I'd like to tell you what I think, the first thing my plan would do is to devote a little over a third of the non-Social Security portion of the surplus, $374 billion over the next 10 years, to strengthen Medicare by extending the life of the Trust Fund to 2027. Now, I think that is very, very important, because, keep in mind, all the baby boomers will start turning 65 in the year 2011. That's not that far away. To young people, that may seem like a long way away. The older you get, that seems like the day after tomorrow. [Laughter] And we've waited a long time. The last time we had a surplus was 1969. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we have here to deal with this. So if we run it out to 2027 and then further complications arise, or difficulties or challenges present themselves, there will be time for future Congresses and Presidents to deal with them without having to take drastic action. So that's the first thing--run the Trust Fund out to 2027. No serious expert on Medicare believes that we can stabilize Medicare without an infusion of new revenues. The second thing we do is to employ some of the best practices in health care today: competition and other practices now in the private sector to keep costs down that don't sacrifice quality and don't require people to be forced out of the fee-for-service Medicare plan if they don't want to be into a managed care plan. We leave free choice open. No requirement. The third thing about this plan that's gotten the least publicity but is potentially very important for our country is that we allow people between the ages of 55 and 65 who aren't working anymore or don't have health insurance on the job and don't have retiree health insurance to buy into Medicare in a way that doesn't compromise the stability of the program. I think that is terribly important. That's a huge problem in our country today and a growing one, people who are out of the work force or working for very small businesses without employer-sponsored care, who can't get any health insurance because of their age or their previous health condition. The fourth thing the plan does is to modernize the benefits of Medicare to match the advances of modern medicine. That means first encouraging seniors and disabled Medicare beneficiaries to take greater advantage of the available prevention mechanisms in our country, preventive tests for cancer, for osteoporosis, for other conditions, by eliminating the deductible and the copay from those tests and paying for it by charging a modest copay for lab tests that are often overused. Now, why is this important? Well, if somebody develops osteoporosis, a severe case, and goes to the hospital and has a prolonged medical regime under Medicare, the taxpayers pay for all of it. But very often, the prevention is not done because of the costs involved. It'll be far less expensive over the long run to spend a little more on prevention now and keep people out of the hospital and the expensive payments we're going to pay if we don't do that. Very important issue. And then we provide, for the first time, for a voluntary and affordable prescription drug benefit. Basically, we propose to start with a $24 a month premium to pay half the drug cost, up to $2,000, phasing up over the next 5 or 6 years to a $5,000 ceiling, with the premium going up that way, in a graduated way. For seniors at 135 percent of poverty or less, we would waive the premium and the copay, and then the premium would be phased in, up to 150 percent of poverty. So there would be subsidies there. Now, there are those who say, ``Well, this is good, but I've got a good retiree health plan with prescription drugs, and if you offer this, my employer will drop it, and it's better than this deal.'' Well, I want you to know that one of the things we've done in here is put substantial subsidies in here to employers who offer drug benefits to their retirees. So I think it is less likely that they will drop the benefits, not more, because they're going to get a real incentive to keep the employer-based retiree programs. The second thing I want to say, again, is this is an entirely voluntary program. Now, the other big criticism of this program has been that, well, they say, two-thirds of the people have prescription drugs already who are retired. That is misleading. That is only accurate by a stretch, and let me explain what I mean by that. We have a report we are releasing today that shows that 75 percent of older Americans lack decent and dependable private sector coverage for prescription drugs. And the problem is getting worse. Fewer than one in four retirees, 24 percent, have drug coverage from their former employers. Now, the number of corporations offering prescription drug benefits to retired employees has dropped by a quarter, 25 percent, just since 1994. Eight percent of the seniors have Medigap drug policies. But as all of you know, Medigap premiums explode as people get older, when they most need the benefits and can least afford the higher prices. Here in Michigan, for example, seniors over 85 must pay over $1,100 a year in Medigap premiums for drug coverage, not counting the $250 deductible. Those high costs are especially hard on women, who tend to have lower incomes than men because they didn't have as many years paying into Social Security or retirement primarily. Seventy-two percent of the Americans over 85 are women. Seventeen percent of seniors have drug benefits through Medicare managed care plans. But three-fifths of these plans cap the benefits at less than $1,000 a year. And listen to this, in just the last 2 years, the percentage that capped drug benefits at only $500 per year has grown by 50 percent. Anybody that's got any kind of medical condition at all will tell you it doesn't take very long to run through $500. So what does this mean? It means that the vast majority of our seniors either have no drug coverage at all or coverage that is unstable, unaffordable, and rapidly disappearing. It means, therefore, that we need a drug plan for our seniors that is simple, that is voluntary, that is available to all, and that is completely dependable. Securing and modernizing Medicare I believe is the right thing to do for our seniors, but I also think it's the right thing to do for all the young people here. And for the next generation, the young parents in their thirties and forties. Why? First, because it guarantees we can get out of debt by 2015. I explained why that's a good idea. Second, because if we do this and we stabilize Social Security and Medicare, we will ease the burden on the children of the baby boom generation who will be raising our grandchildren. It is a way of guaranteeing the stability of the incomes of the children of the seniors on Medicare. And I think that is profoundly important. Now, I've already explained that that's what our budget does. Today the Congress is voting, the House of Representatives is voting on the Republican tax plan, which basically would spend virtually the entire non-Social Security surplus on a tax cut. And it costs a huge amount of money, not just in this 10 years but it triples in cost in the next 10 years. It explodes. And you say, ``I don't want to think about that. I want to think about today.'' You have to think about that. The baby boomers will be retiring in the second decade--in the second decade of the century we're about to begin. And we have to think about that. This plan would give us no money to stabilize or modernize Medicare, and it would require substantial cuts in education, in national defense, in biomedical research, in the environment. And I predict to you that the environment will be a bigger and bigger issue for us all to come to grips with in the years ahead. So we have to figure out what we're going to do. I believe that this plan that's being voted on in Washington will not enable us to pay off our debt; it will not do anything to add to the life of Social Security and Medicare; it will require huge cuts in our other investments and taking care of our kids. And I will veto it if it passes. But the question is what are we going to do? You all know that we fight all the time in Washington, because that's what you hear about. But I would like to reiterate that we joined together to pass welfare reform--and I did, I vetoed two bills first because they took away the guarantee of food and medicine for the poor kids. But I passed the welfare reform bill that required able-bodied people to go to work and provided extra help for child care, for transportation, for training and education for people on welfare. We now have the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years--the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years. And big majorities of both parties in both Houses of Congress voted for it. We fought over the budget for 2 years, but in '97 we passed a bipartisan balanced budget amendment, with big majorities in both parties of both Houses voting for it. And the results have been quite good. So don't be discouraged. You just have to send a clear message. We are capable of working together to do big things. Yesterday 50 economists, including 6 Nobel Prize winners, released a letter supporting my approach. Maybe it's easier for me because I'm not running for election, but I don't think that's right. I trust the American people to support those people in public life who think of the long run, who tell them the truth, who say, I realize it would be popular to spend this surplus, but we've waited 30 years for it, and we now have 30 years' worth of challenges out there facing us, and we cannot afford to squander that. So what I hope to do today is to answer your questions and hear your stories, and let's explore whether or not we really need to do these things for Medicare and whether or not they really will help not only the seniors but the non-seniors in the country. And if you disagree, you ought to say that, too. But my concern now is for what America will be like in 10 years, or 20 years, or 30 years. We've got the country fixed now; it's working fine; everybody is going to be all right now in the near term. The economy is working; things are stable; we're moving in the right direction. But we now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take care of our long-term challenges, and I believe we ought to do it. Thank you very much. [At this point, the conversation proceeded. Participant Janice Southwell asked the President how much time his Medicare plan required before it went into effect.]”