[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[June 22, 1998]
[Pages 1015-1017]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Excerpt of Remarks During the Family Re-Union VII Conference in 
Nashville
June 22, 1998

Family-Centered Health Care

    The President. Is there any kind of national organization of people 
like you, who are working for family-centered 
care everywhere and advocating it?
    Julie Moretz. There is. There actually is--
the Institute for Family-Centered Care, as matter of fact. And there are 
also a lot of family support programs, such as Parent To Parent, 
because, as anyone knows, parents need to be around other parents who 
have gone through similar situations. And there is a lot of support out 
there and I do encourage parents who have been through situations like 
this to get involved. And that is one way parents can get involved.
    The President. Don't you believe that recovery rates are better when 
there's family involvement when the people are in the hospital, whether 
it's children or parents or siblings?
    Ms. Moretz. There is no question about it. 
Daniel has had at least 47 doctors--that I can count--47 doctors come in 
and come out of his room at some given point over 7 years. And I have to 
recognize that we, David and I, we are the constant--and his brother and 
sister--we are the constant in his life, and we are the ones that can 
help to promote and facilitate his health care. Yes--and I have to say 
that his health care has been extremely wonderful. Obviously, he 
wouldn't be here today if it wasn't. So, thank goodness, and we are very 
proud of the health care that he has received.

[The discussion continued.]

Patients' Bill of Rights

    The President. If I could just reinforce something Tony said--and I 
thank you for everything you said--you may hear this in the debate in 
the Congress when this comes up this year. There may be some who really 
don't want this to pass who say, ``Well, look, a lot of companies are 
embracing these principles anyway.'' If a company is willing to say all 
the things Tony said--``If you've got to go to an emergency room, you 
can go; if you need a specialist, you can have it; the doctors can't be 
gagged, they can recommend whatever good care is; if you have a problem 
with your plan, you can have an appeal''--if you have all those things, 
if he does that, why should somebody else be able to put him at a 
financial disadvantage, in whether his plan can make money as compared 
to their plan, by simply not following the same thing?
    It would be even--it's even more unfair to the good HMO's and the 
good managed-care operations in this country not to have this 
legislation, because if they go out and do the right thing, then other 
people who are unscrupulous can come in and try to undercut them by 
appearing to offer the same service at a lower cost. So he just made a 
terrific argument for why this bill ought to pass this year--by doing 
the right thing and because he's doing the right thing.
    I thank you very much.

[The discussion continued.]

Children's Health Insurance Outreach

    The President. I would just like to thank you for what you said. I 
hope that this order that I'm signing today will deal with that by 
essentially telling all the Government agencies that, whenever possible, 
they have to work through people like you to do the outreach--because--
well, this weekend Hillary and I spent some

[[Page 1016]]

time with some friends of ours, and one of them commented that he'd just 
been to a high school graduation in northern Virginia where it was 
announced that the graduates, just a few hundred kids, came from 70 
different national and ethnic groups. That's just one high school. We 
have so many communities--the Asian communities, alone, if you think--
from Southeast Asia and all the different language groups, that a lot of 
these people are, as you pointed out, two-thirds or more are working 
people; many of them, their first language is not English, and if there 
is not some affirmative attempt to reach them through someone they know 
and trust, their children will not get on this program. I don't care how 
many flyers we put out or PSA's we do or anything else.
    This is very valuable, what you've said, and I think we need to work 
a little harder on it. But I thank you for being here.

[The discussion continued.]

Violence in Schools

    The President. First of all, I'd like to thank you for the work you 
do. And I'd also like to thank Mrs. Gore for 
being our administration's leading person on mental health issues. If it 
hadn't been for her, we wouldn't have had a strong mental health 
component in the child health insurance program or the mental health 
parity legislation. And I'm very grateful for that.
    I'd like to ask a question which may be a little unfair, because I 
know you haven't been prepared for it 
exactly, but I'm sure you've thought about it. I just got back from a 
very moving trip out West, and you may have seen it. I visited 
Springfield, Oregon, where they had one of the many, many school 
shootings we've seen. And I've been studying the facts of all these 
cases, and it does appear that in each case or, in most of the cases 
where we've had these terrible tragedies--I might add, against a 
background of dropping juvenile crime overall--that there was some kind 
of early warning. And I wonder if you could recommend to me, because the 
Congress wants to do something on this, everybody is interested in this, 
this is--how do you think we ought to deal with children who--6,100 kids 
were removed from school last year for bringing a gun to school. I'd be 
very surprised if more than 10 percent of them got some sort of 
comprehensive mental health analysis as a result of it.
    We have--goodness knows how many kids made threats that they had no 
earthly intention of doing anything about it, but in one of these school 
shootings there was an explicit threat made beforehand. What advice can 
you give us about what the role of mental health ought to be in sort of 
early warning systems, preventive care, and that sort of thing, and 
particularly--like I said, I don't want to put you on the spot on the 
Springfield thing, but it's very much on my mind because of what was 
told to me out there about the facts and because the young man did have 
a gun in the school the day before and was sent home.
    Sheila Savannah. Well, one of the 
responses that we have pulled together is we have a family resource 
center in an elementary school and so we work with the teachers. And 
we've had to do a lot of training of teachers, of youth development 
workers, of child care workers, to really identify the early signs of 
mental health needs.
    There are so many children with unmet needs. And so often those--
their activities get interpreted as behavior problems, as discipline 
actions, and we don't ever stop and do a strong assessment of what are 
the needs of these children.
    Children that carry guns are afraid. They really have very strong 
reasons for carrying them. And we work with a lot of children that have 
been suspended or expelled because they've been carrying weapons to 
school, and we've been real fortunate in Houston. But I know it's of 
growing concern because there are so many children that don't think that 
they'll live to see 20. And so those are kids that carry guns to protect 
themselves.
    Or, we've spent a lot of time and a lot of prevention efforts that 
focus on children being okay, and so I've seen a lot of children who 
suppress their emotional disturbance. They see violence on the streets; 
they see violence in their homes; and rather than being emotionally 
disturbed, they're being trained to be okay. And so when children 
respond that way, their sensitivity becomes dull, and they can act out 
in those kinds of ways that really hurt humanity.
    And I think one of the things that we need to do is make sure that 
everyone is well aware of some of the signs of mental health needs and 
really work to make sure that we remove the stigmatism to receiving 
mental health services.

[[Page 1017]]

    The President. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 2:15 p.m. in Langford 
Auditorium at Vanderbilt University. In his remarks, he referred to 
discussion participants Julie Moretz, chair, Family Advisory Council, 
Medical College of Georgia Children's Medical Center; Anthony Watson, 
chairman and chief executive officer, New York HIP Health Plans; and 
Sheila Savannah, executive director, People in Partnership, a nonprofit 
organization working with recipients of mental health services.