Bill Clinton: “One of the things that we're working on doing--we haven't figured out how to solve it entirely yet, but I think would…”

“One of the things that we're working on doing--we haven't figured out how to solve it entirely yet, but I think would make a huge difference to small businesses, especially to people like you with big workers' comp bills, but a lot of businesses that aren't particularly dangerous have big workers' comp bills--is to try to figure out a way to take the health care portion of workers' comp and at least have some common administration of it so that you're not, in effect, paying twice for it. Because right now, as you know, workers' comp, it's a disability program, it's an unemployment program, and it's a health care program, all three. But if you have a health care system, we think we can figure out how to moderate a lot of the health care portion of workers' comp costs, which has accounted for approximately 50 percent of the rate increases in State after State in the last few years, in this health care thing. And that would also be a big boost to small business, because it's all part of the same cost of operations. Jim? Anybody else have anything they want to say? [Representative Slattery stated that Congress would address the issues that the participants discussed including requiring everyone to contribute to the health care system so some businesses would not be paying more than others.]”