    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [August 21, 1996]
    [Pages 1319-1321]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1319]]

    Remarks on Signing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
    Act of 1996
    August 21, 1996

        Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for that
    wonderful introduction, Merit, and thank you for the courage of your
    example.
        I want to begin by recognizing the Members of Congress who are here
    who worked on this so hard. In addition to Senators Kassebaum and
    Kennedy, we have Senator John Breaux, Senator Bill Cohen, Senator Byron
    Dorgan, Senator Carl Levin, Congressman Mike Bilirakis, Congressman John
    Conyers, Congressman Harris Fawell and Congressman Dennis Hastert,
    Congressman David Hobson, and Congressman Bill Thomas. I thank all of
    them for their work on this.
        I thank Secretary Shalala for her hard work; the SBA Administrator,
    Phil Lader, who is here. I'd also like to recognize a gentleman in the
    audience who did a lot of work with the First Lady on this and who is,
    I'm sure, happy to be here today, our former Surgeon General, Dr.
    Everett Koop. Thank you, sir, for being here. And Dr. Henry Foster, it's
    nice to see you; thank you for being here, sir.
        There are so many others I'd like to thank. I want to thank all the
    consumer groups, the business groups, the labor groups, the grassroots
    people, the people who were personally affected by health care problems
    and problems in our system, who are here. All of you worked so hard to
    make this day a reality. I want to thank all the people who worked on
    the staff at the White House, the people especially who worked with the
    First Lady from 1993 on. All of you should take some great satisfaction
    in seeing this day come to pass, and I want you to know that I will
    never forget the work that all of you have done and the service you have
    rendered to the American people, and we thank you.
        But a lot of people who worked on health reform were just folks,
    people that Hillary met traveling around the country, or people that I
    had the good fortune to run into who told me their stories and who
    helped to work to make this day a reality. People like Dan Lumley, who
    is here with us today, a man we met on our bus tour, from Portland,
    Oregon. And there have been many others who have helped, like Kristin
    Hopper and Tensia Alvarez, who are here with their families today. We
    thank you for coming here with your families.
        And let me again especially thank Merit Kimball and her wonderful
    parents, Jack and Rosemary, who have come here today. They have had the
    courage to tell their story and to fight for their cause and on behalf
    of tens of millions of other Americans. They have given us the hope that
    together we can make things better for more Americans.
        The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act shows what
    happens, as Senator Kassebaum said and Senator Kennedy said, when we
    work together, when we cross party lines and put the interests of the
    American people first. This bill is a clear boost to our values as
    Americans. It offers opportunity by allowing people to take their health
    insurance from job to job. It rewards responsibility by helping people
    to work who desperately want to work. It brings us together in a common
    community to do what's right by all of our people, saying that we ought
    to make it possible for more and more people to succeed at work without
    losing the security of knowing that when they need health care it'll be
    there.
        Health care reform is measured by how many lives it improves. With
    this bill we take a long step toward the kind of health care reform our
    Nation needs. It seals the cracks that swallow as many as 25 million
    Americans who can't get insurance or who fear they'll lose it. Now
    they're going to be protected.
        Never has such a measure been more needed for our people. Our new
    economy presents Americans with opportunities like never before to work
    their way into better paying jobs. And yet our health care system has
    worked to paralyze many workers who fear losing their health care
    coverage if they take those better jobs and change their employers. At
    the same time, millions of Americans find themselves labeled as people
    with preexisting conditions, from cancer to AIDS, which disqualifies
    them and their families for coverage, including the husband, the
    pregnant wife who lose their insurance; the young woman who can't change
    jobs because

    [[Page 1320]]

    her new insurance doesn't cover diabetes; the small-business owner who
    faithfully pays group health insurance premiums for years and then finds
    that his coverage won't be renewed because one of his employees has
    developed a heart condition.
        No more. This bill changes all that. Today we declare a victory for
    millions of Americans and their families. No longer will you live in
    fear of losing your health insurance because of the state of your
    health. No longer need you hesitate about taking a better job because
    you're afraid to lose your coverage. And no longer will small businesses
    be denied access to insurance for their employees. The health insurance
    reform bill I sign today will protect the health care of millions of
    working Americans and give them and their families something that cannot
    be measured, peace of mind.
        The bill also addresses other problems in getting more affordable
    insurance to our workers. It makes it easier and less expensive for the
    self-employed to purchase their insurance. As Senator Kassebaum said, it
    phases in a tax deduction of 80 percent for the self-employed and helps
    to even the playing field with bigger businesses. Second, it prevents
    fraud and abuse. It toughens penalties and helps us to go after bad
    apple health care providers who bilk the system of billions of dollars
    from Medicare, from Medicaid, and from private insurance companies. I
    especially want to thank Secretary Shalala for her work on these fraud
    and abuse provisions. Third, it makes the health care system more
    simple. It will modernize, streamline, and cut the cost of insurance
    paperwork by devising a uniform electronic system for paying health care
    claims. It will provide steps to protect the privacy of people in the
    system as it does so. Fourth, it allows the establishment of a limited
    number of medical savings accounts to allow us to study this approach
    and see how it works, to determine whether this new approach can make a
    positive contribution to health care coverage and to affordability. And
    fifth, it helps with long-term care. It provides consumer protections
    and makes long-term care insurance more affordable. This bill, in short,
    does a very great deal.
        I want to echo what Senator Kennedy said: Senator Kassebaum, we are
    deeply in your debt. We're going to miss you, and you must be very proud
    that here in the last months of your career in the Senate you have done
    such a magnificent thing. We thank you so much, ma'am.
        Senator Kennedy, as I told you before we came out here, when I woke
    up this morning and thought about signing this bill today, I remembered
    a day a very long time ago, almost 18 years ago now, when I moderated a
    panel on health care reform in Memphis, Tennessee, at one of our many
    conventions, in 1978. And you were there, telling the American people in
    1978 that every person in America deserved the health care that your son
    had when he was first taken ill. I'm proud of you for these two decades
    of commitment, sir. Thank you.
        And if you'll forgive me a personal note, I believe, Hillary, that
    this justifies all those days on the road and all those nights you
    stayed up reading the incomprehensibly complex issues of health care.
    [Applause] Thank you.
        I wish this bill had contained the provision to eliminate the
    differential treatment of mental health coverage or at least taken some
    positive steps in that direction. I know this is something that is
    especially important to Tipper Gore, and I know that we all know that
    we're going to have to deal with that.
        And we have to do more, and this is also very important. We must
    find a way to provide coverage for workers and their families who are in
    transition. I have proposed a plan which we put in our balanced budget
    to cover 3 million workers and their families, including 700,000
    children, who today have nowhere to turn for affordable health care
    because the worker is changing jobs. If a person is doing the right
    thing, trying to be responsible, dying to go to work, we should help
    those kind of people to get back on their feet without being thrown flat
    on their back without health insurance.
        Our mission in pursuing health care reform from the start has been
    to provide more fairness and quality for the American people. That's why
    we worked to strengthen the Medicare Trust Fund, although we must do
    more, and our balanced budget plan does that. That's why we've worked to
    preserve and to protect Medicaid, why we focused on the problems of
    health care costs, which, thanks to efforts in the private sector, to
    our own efforts, and to the general direction of our economy with growth
    with low inflation, inflation in health care slowed to 3.9 percent in
    1995, the lowest in 23 years. And for the first half of this year, it is
    down to

    [[Page 1321]]

    less than 2 percent and may go lower still. We must not let this be a
    temporary development.
        That's also why we've worked to raise childhood immunization rates
    dramatically; to increase investment in biomedical research, including
    funding for breast cancer and AIDS; why we've expedited the FDA review
    process in approval for new drugs, so that people who need a miracle
    might be able to find it; why we fought to protect our children from the
    harmful effects of tobacco advertising aimed at them.
        But now we need to build on what we have achieved. I was encouraged
    to see Senator Kassebaum with her coach's mentality saying that the game
    is not over, and we still have another month this year. And Senator, I'm
    suited up and ready to play. And I appreciate you saying that.
        This is a particularly happy day for me because, like yesterday when
    we signed the minimum wage bill and the bill which gave such strong
    incentives to small businesses to invest in their own businesses and
    made it so much easier for people to adopt children who were willing to
    take on that profoundly important responsibility--these 2 days together,
    and this day especially, helps ordinary Americans to benefit from the
    growth and progress in the American economy. America is on the right
    track, not only when the overall numbers look good but when every
    responsible American family can participate in that.
        It's good that we have 10 million new jobs, record numbers of new
    businesses, that we have the lowest deficit and the highest rates of
    homeownership in 15 years. That's very good. But it's even better when
    every single American who is willing to be responsible for his or her
    family and his or her work can participate in those trends. And with
    portable health care, the minimum wage increase, additional incentives
    for small business growth, more pension security, moving people from
    welfare to work, that will help all Americans to be a part of our 21st
    century America.
        We have more to do in educational opportunity, in helping people
    with their child care and childrearing obligations, in helping people to
    buy their first home, in finishing the job of balancing the budget so
    that we can keep interest rates down and inflation down. But we are
    clearly moving on the right track.
        I look forward to working with Congress when they come back in
    September and to continuing this effort. I want to say again, this bill
    passed almost unanimously. This is a bill that both Senators Kennedy and
    Kassebaum can be proud of because they brought all their colleagues
    along with them. This is a bill that people who have been working in the
    House for years and years and years on health care reform can be proud
    of, and so can everybody else who showed up and voted for it. And
    Congressman Hastert, I want to echo what Senator Kassebaum said, we
    appreciate your work and we know how much you did to get those last few
    difficult issues resolved in a way that we could all live with.
        We can do things when we work together and put the American people
    first. And whenever we work on behalf of our families and our children,
    as we do with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,
    America always wins.
        So now, in the names of the families and children who will have
    better lives because of it, I am honored to sign this profoundly
    important piece of legislation. And I'd like to ask the Members of
    Congress to come up and join me, along with the families who are here.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Merit Kimball, director of
    communications, Alliance for Health Reform; and Henry W. Foster, Jr.,
    Senior Adviser to the President on Teen Pregnancy and Youth Issues. H.R.
    3103, approved August 21, was assigned Public Law No. 104-191.