[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 6, 1994]
[Pages 854-856]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 854]]


Remarks on Women's Health Care
May 6, 1994

    Thank you, Mrs. Bailey, for the wonderful introduction and for the 
wonderful life you have lived.
    I want to thank all the mothers who are here for doing such a good 
job with their sons and daughters, helping them to achieve a full 
measure of ambition. I want to thank the Vice President and Mrs. Gore 
for being wonderful examples of good parents. And I want to thank my 
wonderful wife for being the best mother I have ever known, as well as 
for taking on this often thankless but terribly important job.
    You know, since Tipper was kind enough to mention my mother--I was 
sitting here thinking, I know some of these mothers here. Rosa DeLauro's 
mother campaigned with me in New Haven, and Rosa said, ``You need to get 
my mother to go with you. She's worth a lot more votes than I am.'' 
[Laughter] So I watched all the people along the way being too 
intimidated to say no, they wouldn't vote for me. [Laughter] Sure 
enough, we carried it.
    On Mother's Day we tend to think of the wonderful and warm and kind 
and loving and sacrificial things our mothers do. You heard Hillary say 
that, like most families, mothers make the health care decisions and 
prod everybody else to do it. But you know, very often mothers are also 
the most practical members of the family and the most hard-headed and 
the most insistent that we face up to our responsibilities. Very often 
the values, the internal character structure of children is profoundly 
influenced by the sort of daily insistence of mothers that you just face 
up to your daily tasks and do your job and life will take care of 
itself. And that may seem terribly elemental, but one of the reasons 
that I ran for President is I thought all that had been abandoned here, 
and there was a lot more talk than action.
    Now, last month, we just learned today that our economy produced 
267,000 new jobs, in no small measure because the people in this 
National Government have begun to take responsibility for bringing the 
deficit down and trying to do things that will grow the economy.
    Yesterday, in a heroic move, the United States House of 
Representatives voted to ban 19 assault weapons. It was a very difficult 
thing for some of the Members, who were literally threatened with losing 
their seats and their political careers. But in the end, they got beyond 
the rhetoric to a very commonsense, old-fashioned American judgment that 
it was the right thing to do, the disciplined thing to do, the sort of 
thing your mother would be proud of you if you did. [Laughter]
    I say that because I want to focus on what your mother would tell 
you to do in health care, not just for emotional reasons but because 
every day, those of us who are charged with the responsibility of 
working here are supposed to get up and do what my mother told me to do, 
which is to do your job. And my mother used to tell me all the time, 
``Bill, you give a good speech, but you still have to do something--
[laughter]--in the end you still have to do something.''
    There's so much talk and genuine concern in this country about the 
American family. We're here paying tribute to it. Sunday we'll pay 
enormous tribute to it. And I think all of us would admit, whether we're 
Democrats or Republicans or independents and whatever our political 
philosophies are, that if the families of this country weren't in so 
much trouble, we'd have about half as many problems as we've got. I 
think we all know that. But what I want to ask you is what my mother 
would ask me, ``Well, so what are you going to do about it?'' And how 
can we be so concerned with the stability of the family as an 
institution, and still walk away from those stories that Hillary talked 
to you about? I mean, we've heard so many of these stories, we can't 
keep up with them all now. We literally cannot keep up with them all.
    Millions of women in this country have no health insurance. Many 
more have insurance policies full of the kind of loopholes that you 
heard Hillary describe. There are policies that deny mammograms or that 
don't pay for well-baby visits or prescription drugs, that routinely 
exclude pregnancy as a preexisting condition. How can a pro-family 
country say pregnancy is a preexisting condition? Some insurance 
companies have gone so far as to call domestic violence a preexisting 
condition. Well, so is breathing.

[[Page 855]]

    A couple of weeks ago, in the New York Times, there was a remarkable 
column by a novelist named Anne Hood who wrote how the system fails 
families today. She said she was a self-employed writer and her husband 
had a hard time finding health insurance. And when they finally found 
insurance that they were actually able to purchase, the quarterly 
payment was $1,800. That's $7,200 a year for a family policy.
    And still, after they paid all that money, their worries weren't 
over. She and her husband moved from New York to Rhode Island, and she 
had a baby. After the baby was born, she learned the insurance company 
had dropped their coverage when they moved 6 months into her pregnancy. 
And to renew her insurance would have cost $2,000 more a quarter, an 
extra $8,000 a year for maternity coverage. That was more than it would 
cost to have the baby.
    Now, it's seems to me that common sense tells you that if we can 
make it possible for self-employed people, like this fine woman and her 
husband, and small business people to afford to take care of themselves 
and their families and to stop passing on their costs to the rest of us, 
and we can organize it so they can buy insurance on the same terms that 
those of us who work for government or big business can, that we ought 
to do that. And it seems to me that their mothers would tell them they 
ought to pay a little for it and assume their responsibility, too.
    We have got to try to reform this system to try to help people stay 
healthy and take care of them when they're sick. In any given year, 
about a third of all American women fail to get basic preventive 
services, like clinical breast exams, Pap smears, complete physicals. 
More than half of all American women over the age of 50 fail to receive 
a mammogram, often because of problems with their insurance.
    In medical research, women have been on the sidelines too long, too 
little research into the causes and cure of breast cancer and 
osteoporosis. Heart disease is a number one killer of women, but until 
recently, all of the search for a cure was centered only on men. The 
simple fact is that we've paid too little attention to the unique 
problems of women.
    I met with a lot of mothers this week whose children either have or 
have already died of AIDS, and there are an enormous number of women who 
now have the HIV virus and who have passed it along to their children, 
or some have it and some don't. And we don't know whether or not there 
are different potential resolutions of this for women than for men.
    We're trying to change all that in this administration. For one 
thing, I've put only women in charge of the health care struggle. Donna 
Shalala is Secretary of Health and Human Services. America became the 
first nation in the world to establish a senior Government position to 
oversee women's health issues. I put a woman and a mother in charge of 
health care reform, and you can see she's done a pretty good job, and 
we're all still pretty healthy.
    We created an office of research on women's health at the National 
Institutes of Health, and increased funding for breast cancer research, 
for a national action plan on breast cancer, for research into other 
problems that affect women. We removed barriers that stood in the way of 
finding cures to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. We passed the 
family and medical leave law, a pro-family bill if I ever saw it. You 
ought to read the letters that we get on that.
    But if we really want to do right by the American family, and if we 
really want to honor our mothers, if we want the emotional satisfaction 
of seeing a lot of that pain taken away and the personal satisfaction of 
thinking we have done what our mothers would have told us to do, which 
is to face up to our responsibilities and do the right thing, then we've 
got to find a way to provide health care to all Americans, to guarantee 
comprehensive benefits, including preventive care, including those 
screenings and tests and check-ups to keep people well, not just spend a 
fortune on them when they really get in trouble.
    We've got to preserve the right to choose doctors that women 
normally make the choice of. And our older women need to be able to rely 
on Medicare.
    We can do these things. We can fix what's wrong with our system and 
not mess up what's right. But in order to do it, it's going to take the 
same discipline that was required to deal with the problems of the 
economy, the same courage that was required to take that vote yesterday 
on assault weapons, and some memory that that is, after all, what we 
were raised by our mothers to do. And on Mother's Day, I hope that we 
will all resolve that by Mother's Day next year, the women who cared for 
us will have a health care system that cares for them.

[[Page 856]]

    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:52 a.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Barbara Bailey, mother of 
Representative Barbara B. Kennelly, and Luisa DeLauro, mother of 
Representative Rosa L. DeLauro.