Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, that is a bigger problem with Medicaid than Medicare, as you know, I'm sure. The budget that I…”

“Well, first of all, that is a bigger problem with Medicaid than Medicare, as you know, I'm sure. The budget that I introduced to do that, to cut down on Medicare reimbursement, is a budget that assumes we're not going to do anything else about health care. Within 100 days of my taking office, we're going to present a plan to the Congress to try to deal with the cost shifting problem. The question she asked indicates a real understanding of the problem. If all you do is to cut what the Government pays to doctors and hospitals, if you cut it below their real costs, then the medical providers will find a way to recover their real costs from people who pay directly or through private insurance, and the insurance premiums will go up more. So what we have to do is to do what every other country in the world but America has done and develop some sort of all-payer system where the reimbursement levels are pretty much the same and where you have real efforts to eliminate unnecessary duplication and waste and paperwork that benefit the private sector along with the public sector, and that's what we're going to do. In other words, I just presented the best budget I could with the system we've got, but what we need is a comprehensive system which eliminates the cost shifting from the Medicare and Medicaid to the private sector and has some cost reduction mechanisms that benefit everybody. Let me say--I don't know, there must be some people that work at the factories in town or work in other manufacturing facilities. Our program has some significant tax incentives over the next 5 years for businesses big and small to reinvest, to create jobs, and to become more productive. But the best thing we could do, better than an investment tax credit, better than the tax changes for big manufacturers, the best thing we could do is to find a way to get health costs in line with inflation and still take care of everybody in America. If you did that, you'd free up hundreds of billions of dollars to make America compete again. And so that's a very good question. Yes, let's take one over here. We haven't taken any over here. NAFTA”