Bill Clinton: “Who is covered under your policy? You and your wife and one child. How old are you? For a family of three at your age, a…”

“Who is covered under your policy? You and your wife and one child. How old are you? For a family of three at your age, a community rating bill should not have raised your insurance premiums. But let me just say this. This is the hazard. You are going to hear all of this debate when we go along. I don't want to, again, sort of prefigure the congressional debate, but you'll hear a lot of people say, well, let's just do this little part of this, or let's do that or the other thing. The problem is if you go to community rating, you also have to allow people who run accounting firms, who are self-employed, to be in very large pools so that you have a representative community in the pool. And you also have to allow them to buy their services in some sort of competitive way so you can have the leverage there of the large pool. I hope you will all remember that when you hear this debate, when people say, well, let's do all this stuff, but don't really require universal coverage. If you don't do that, you'll have the same sort of cost shifting, the same sort of people falling through the cracks, the same sort of escalating costs you've got now, I think. I can't imagine how we could do it otherwise. And so, I appreciate what you said. [A Medicare recipient asked about medication coverage under the new plan.]”