Bill Clinton: “I'd like to emphasize that for most of the last 20 years, big businesses have paid way more than their fair share of the…”

“I'd like to emphasize that for most of the last 20 years, big businesses have paid way more than their fair share of the health care, and the rest of us have sort of ridden along with them. I mean, you've got some companies paying 15, 16 percent of payroll for health care. In other words, they've paid more than the percentage of our total wealth we spend on health care. And the rest of us have benefited from that. Now, big businesses and governments are finding that they can get competitive arrangements and buy health care for less money or at least they don't have to go up as much as inflation anymore, which is going to put more and more pressure on small business; which is why we've got to find a way, unless we want more and more people to be without insurance altogether, why we've got to find a way to get everybody insured and then get them in these larger pools. Let me just make one remark that I meant to say to our friend with the construction company. He said some of his best workers were over 60, including his father. Let me tell you, the fastest growing group of Americans are people over 65. More and more Americans are going to work well into their seventies. The average 18-year-old is going to change jobs eight times in a lifetime now. You have people in their late fifties and sixties losing their jobs because the defense business is cutting back. And there they are, 59 years old, some of them still with kids at home not even out of high school, having to find new jobs. This health care issue is a big issue. And one of the things that I think is very important about community rating is that we not discriminate against people in their sixties who are otherwise healthy and able to be good workers. Because if you do that, you're going to make it harder for people to change jobs. And one of the reasons that America--believe it or not, with all of our economic problems, we have a lower unemployment rate than all of our major competitors except Japan. We're now creating more jobs than all of them. And one of the reasons is that people can move freely in and out of the job market. But it's going to be harder and harder and harder for older people unless we remove this discrimination against age. So your company would be especially helped by that. In other words, you'd be able to buy insurance on much fairer rates if we said that vigorous working people in their sixties shouldn't be charged more than vigorous working people in their thirties. It would make a big difference. But again I will say, since the odds are still greater that a 60-year-old will get sick than that a 30-year-old will get sick, the only way the insurance industry can provide this health insurance and not go broke is if you have big pools of people where the risk can be broadly spread. That's the only fair way to do it. Dan, you want to say anything? [Representative Glickman discussed the inclusion of workers' compensation in the health insurance plan and then questioned the average 80 percent employer share of the cost.]”