Bill Clinton: “Oh, I think so. What we're going to try to do with this health care plan is to make sure that everybody, whether…”

“Oh, I think so. What we're going to try to do with this health care plan is to make sure that everybody, whether employed or unemployed, has access to a basic package of comprehensive benefits. Every other country in the world, advanced country, does this. Every industrialized country but South Africa does this, everybody. And yet we spend 30 percent more of our income on health care than anybody else. Now, if you have access to health care in America it's the best in the world--and a lot of good things about it. But there are ways to give people a choice of doctors, high quality care, and do it for lower cost if we're willing to take on the insurance cost, if we're willing to take on a lot of the other waste in this system, the phenomenal waste. The paperwork in the American health care system alone is enough to cover virtually everybody without health insurance. Let me just give you an example. In most hospitals in America today for the last 5 years have hired clerical workers at 4 times the rate of health caregivers like nurses, even though there's been a national nursing shortage. Why? Because we're the only country in the world with 1,500 separate health insurance companies writing thousands of different policies, covering small, small groups with a blizzard of rules that would choke a horse. Plus the Government makes it worse by the way we run Medicare and Medicaid. And we're going to try to fix it. It's the most complicated problem I've ever messed with. But if we don't fix it, we can't control the deficit, we can't restore health to the economy, and most important, we can't restore security to the lives of people like those who've asked these questions tonight. Child Care Mr. Bonds. Child care and the terrible dilemma that so many working parents have had finding competent child care has obviously been in the news a great deal recently, Mr. President. Hattie Henry lives in a community just north of Atlanta. She is a first-time mother with a 6- week-old baby. And you want to go back to your job as a nurse. You're struggling with that dilemma. Is there something that you think that the President can do to help ease this terrible child care crisis out there?”