Bill Clinton: “Sheryl asked two questions. I think we ought to try to deal with them as forthrightly as possible. The first question…”

“Sheryl asked two questions. I think we ought to try to deal with them as forthrightly as possible. The first question is, okay, if I have to go from 5.5 to 7.9, how do I know it's going to stay at 7.9? I mean, that may be the most important question of all. And the answer to that question is--I mean, I can only tell you where I'm coming from on this--is that we looked at what the average employer contribution was for a good health care plan that included primary and preventive benefits--because one of the ways you get health care costs down is to emphasize primary and preventive benefits; nearly any physician will tell you that--and it was about 8 percent. So we decided to go with 7.9 percent. And from my point of view, if we can't manage at that, we'll have to find some other way of dealing with it, not raising the payroll cost. I just don't think we can. The whole idea is to try to get health care costs as close to the rate of inflation plus population growth as possible. The second issue is what about people who--if you go back to Sheryl's situation, she went from 5.5 percent, let's say, to 7.9 percent of payroll. You should know that we provide discounts for small businesses if they have fewer than 70 to 75 employees, and if the average annual wage is $24,000 a year or less. Is that right, Erskine? So if you go over either one of those, then the discount system goes away. But the main reason for the difference--and I haven't looked at the health care package--is that she's on a 50-50 cost share. And the reason we went to an 80-20 is that that was the average cost share of employers and employees in the private sector insured now. But I'll bet you that the package will be better, too, as a result of that, because again of the bulk buying plan. So even she would benefit from that. But we've got to be up front about this. Not everybody pays less. Some people pay more, and that's part of the assessment you have to calculate. But I do think you can rely on the 7.9 percent. I do not believe the Congress would enact a program and I do not believe that I would support it unless we could do that. And let me also say, we had lots and lots of insurance actuaries and others look at this for a year and constantly labor over the costs. So we would not knowingly do anything that would run the cost up. And I will say that, as Erskine was reminding me earlier, our ability to predict these costs now is far better than it used to be. We've been pretty good about predicting what's going to happen to our medical costs for the last few years. And I think that ability is pretty well intact. Let's go on now to James Heiman, who's in, again, in a different situation. And I'd like for him to talk about his businesses and what he does about it and how he thinks he'd be affected by this. [James Heiman stated that his cost to provide health insurance for all the employees in his agriculture-related companies increased by 2 to 3 percent overnight due to an employee's health problems and his own. While he found a more affordable policy, he expressed concern that the President's plan would be able to hold administrative costs down.]”