[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 7, 1994]
[Pages 615-617]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Arrival in Kansas City, Missouri
April 7, 1994

    Thank you very much, Governor Carnahan, Mayor and Mrs. Cleaver, Mr. 
Holden, Speaker Griffin, and all of you. Thank you for coming out today. 
I didn't know there would be such a good crowd here. I'd like to stay 
with you longer, but I'm afraid I'll be late to the meeting if I stay 
too long.
    I do want to say a word or two if I might. First of all, I thank you 
for your sentiments, and I thank the Mayor and the Governor for what 
they said. I've had the opportunity to come to Missouri quite a lot 
since I've been President, mostly because of the terrible ravages of the 
floods that gripped your State. I'm proud of the work that we were able 
to do together and proud of the response of my administration to the 
problems of people during that flood.
    Frankly, the one thing that bothers me is that we can't have our 
National Government function all the time the way it did during that 
flood. Why does there have to be an emergency before people will stop 
using all the hot air and rhetoric that seems to grip Washington, put 
aside the special interests, talk to one another, ask what the problem 
is, and try to get it solved? I ran for President because that's what I 
wanted to do.
    When I was the Governor of your neighboring State to the south, it 
never occurred to me that I could get by day-in and day-out just on hot 
air. It never occurred to me that the pur-


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pose of politics was to try to take words and push people to the 
furthest extreme, to the left or the right. And I ran for President 
because I got tired of all the rhetoric, people saying Government 
couldn't do anything or Government could do everything, people saying 
everybody out there is on their own or people saying that people had no 
responsibility to improve their own lot. And I felt that if we could 
pull this country together and face our problems, we could go into the 
next century with the American dream alive and well. That's what we're 
trying to do, and we've made a good beginning on it.
    I just want to point out that in the 15 months that I've been 
President, since we got our economic plan in place, trying to drive down 
interest rates and drive up investment, our economy has produced 2.5 
million jobs, 90 percent of them in the private sector, more than were 
produced in the previous 4-year period. After 12 years of talking about 
the deficit while the national debt tripled, if the Congress adopts the 
budget I have given them now, we'll eliminate 100 Federal programs, cut 
over 200 more, have the first decrease in discretionary domestic 
spending since 1969, and we'll have 3 years of declining Government 
deficits for the first time since Harry Truman of Independence, 
Missouri, was President of the United States of America.
    One of the things that bothers me is that sometimes I think that out 
here in the country, folks are worried that nothing's getting done in 
Washington because of what they read about in the papers. Let me tell 
you, we are moving more rapidly to do more things than we did even last 
year. The Congress is moving forward at a record pace on the budget. The 
Congress will take up a crime bill as soon as it comes back on Monday, 
which will put 100,000 police officers on the street, take assault 
weapons off the street; it will stiffen penalties and reduce parole for 
seriously dangerous repeat violent offenders; and it will give our 
children the means to have recreational facilities, alternatives to 
imprisonment for first offenses, and other things that will give them a 
chance to avoid the trouble that has come to so many people in the high 
crime areas of our country. We can do better, and we're going to with 
that crime bill.
    We have an education bill that we just passed that, for the first 
time in the history of the country, provides world class standards for 
all of our schools and encourages grassroots reforms to achieve them. 
Soon after the Congress comes back we're going to pass the school-to-
work bill, which says to all the kids that don't go on to 4-year 
colleges, ``We care about you, too; your education, your training, and 
your future's important. We want you to be able to get at least 2 years 
of further training after you leave high school.''
    These are the kinds of things that we're doing up there. And I came 
here tonight also to talk about this health care issue. Let me remind 
you, my fellow Americans, that health care in America costs 40 to 50 
percent more of our income than it does in any other country, and yet 
we're the only advanced country that doesn't provide health insurance to 
all of our people so that all of our working people have health care 
security.
    Let me remind you that people on welfare get health care paid for by 
the Government. But if someone leaves welfare and takes a minimum wage 
job without health insurance, then that person puts his or her family at 
risk. The kids don't have health insurance, and you start paying taxes 
for somebody who wouldn't go to work to have health care. That is crazy, 
and we can do better.
    Let me remind you that we have 81 million Americans--81 million of 
us live in families where somebody's been sick, where there's been a 
child with diabetes, a father with a heart attack, a mother with cancer. 
And they have what the insurance companies call preexisting conditions, 
which means that under the present system, you either pay higher 
insurance rates, you can't get insurance at all, or you can never change 
your job because if you do you lose your health insurance. No other 
country tolerates that. We live in a country where the average 18-year-
old will change jobs eight times in a lifetime; when people in their 
fifties and sixties are losing their jobs, having to find new ones, and 
they can't get health insurance now because they're older and their 
rates are higher than younger people. That is wrong. We can do better. 
And we can do better without messing up what's good about America's 
health care system.
    So all of my adversaries on this health care thing, I wish everybody 
would just tone the rhetoric down and talk about the real existence of 
real problems and how we can solve them. The truth is I don't want the 
Government to run the health care system. It's a private system; it 
ought to stay private. What I want is guaran-


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teed private insurance for everybody. I want all of you to be able to 
choose your doctor or your health care plan, not just once but every 
year. More and more workers and their families are losing the right to 
choose their health care plan. I want to guarantee it for all Americans. 
And I want people to be guaranteed those benefits in the workplace, just 
like most of us are today. And finally, I want small business people and 
self-employed people to have access to the same good competitive rates 
that those of us in Government and big business do today. I think that 
is fair, reasonable, and just. And if we don't do it, we're going to 
continue to have serious problems in this country.
    I hope you will help us provide health care security for all. We've 
been fooling with it for 60 years. We haven't done it yet. And what have 
we got to show for it? Continued problems. We can do better, and this 
year we're going to, with your help.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. at the Kansas City Downtown 
Municipal Airport. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Mel Carnahan of 
Missouri; Mayor Emanuel Cleaver II of Kansas City, MO, and his wife, 
Dianne; Bob Holden, Missouri State treasurer; and Bob Griffin, speaker, 
Missouri House of Representatives.