    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 7, 1999]
    [Pages 1712-1715]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Reception in New
    York City
    October 7, 1999

        Thank you. Please be seated.
        Let me, first of all, thank Dennis and all
    of you for this event and for your support for the Democratic Senate
    Campaign Committee. Senator Schumer was
    supposed to be here tonight, but they're voting late, so he's working
    for you, and I'm filling in for him. [Laughter] That's sort of getting
    prepared for my life after the Presidency. I'm sort of the stand-in
    speaker tonight for Chuck Schumer. [Laughter]
        I'd like to thank you again for your support for the Senators, and
    I'd like to thank, as I always try to do, the people of New York City
    and New York State for being so very good to me and the Vice President
    and our whole administration over these last 6\1/2\ years.
        I would like to just make a brief statement about the event that
    we're here for. I think all of you know that we Democrats have
    maintained a constant commitment to the health care

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    of our people and to the well-being of the health care network. We all
    are very well aware that, as Hillary
    warned us back in 1994, the number of uninsured people continues to rise
    and will continue to do so until we do things that cover more people and
    stem the hemorrhaging of loss of coverage.
        I will say this: We've got some specific proposals out there that I
    think will begin to make a dent in that this year. This is the first
    year that all the States are enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance
    Program. Now what we have to do is go out and get the children enrolled.
    The States are enrolled. We have to get the children enrolled. As all of
    you know--I see a lot of you nodding your heads--it's easier to say than
    to do; to find these people, to tell them that even though they may be
    Medicaid-eligible, they are eligible for this; please come enroll. But
    we need to make a huge, Herculean effort over the next 6 months, to get
    every single eligible child in America enrolled in these programs. It
    will also help to alleviate the financial problems of a lot of our
    health care providers, and we need to do it.
        The second thing I would note is that in my Medicare reform this
    year, I have asked the Congress to allow people between the ages of 55
    and 65 to buy into the Medicare program. A lot of the people without
    health insurance between 55 and 65 can't get health insurance from
    anybody else. But they're middle-class people, and they do have the
    funds to afford a Medicare buy-in. We can do that with the present
    budget I've given the Congress, and I hope we will do it.
        The third thing I would note is, I do believe that some time before
    the Congress goes home, they will pass what is known as the Kennedy-
    Jeffords bill, which will allow disabled people on Medicaid to go into
    the workplace and keep their Medicaid, which will put more people in the
    workplace and continue the flow of funds to the health care system and
    enable them to keep their health care.
        There will doubtless be more to be debated about this. Now, let me
    say a word about what happened in 1997. I am not at all surprised that
    the 1997 Balanced Budget Act imposed greater burdens on the health care
    system than were estimated. And some of you were involved in that and
    know that we had a figure of the savings we wanted to achieve, and we,
    in the administration, having good data from all of you, gave the
    Congress a set of changes we thought would be necessary to meet that
    figure.
        The Congressional Budget Office did not believe we would achieve
    those savings and therefore said we had to do more things. So we did
    everything that the CBO said we had to do, and we had more savings than
    we needed to meet the original budget targets, and it came right out of
    the teaching hospitals, a lot of the therapeutic services people, a lot
    of the other things. All of you know this.
        We are working hard now. I've had a conversation--every time they
    come back from New York or anywhere else, Hillary and the Vice President
    ask me, ``When are we going to do something about this Medicaid problem?
    We've got to deal with this.'' We understand that. I think that there is
    now a consensus in the Congress in both Houses and, I think,
    increasingly in both parties, that part of the last budget negotiations
    will require funds flowing back to deal with this problem, and I will do
    the best I can with that.
        Let me just make some general points here. When I came to New York
    in 1992 as the nominee with my family and my then very new Vice
    Presidential partner and his family and asked the American people and
    the people of this State to take a chance on us because we thought we
    could turn the country around--and it's been so long since things were
    bad, people had forgotten how bad they were in 1992, but they were quite
    bad, indeed--I asked you to take a chance based on an argument I made. I
    said, ``You know, I think that the politics of division in Washington
    are hurting America. You've either got to be pro-business or pro-labor.
    You've got to be pro-growth or pro-environment. All these things have to
    be opposed to one another. You have to be for big deficits or cutting
    spending on education.'' And I just don't believe that's the way the
    world works. I never have believed that. All of us in our own lives try
    to find ways to unify our objectives and pull things together to go
    forward.
        And so I said to the American people, ``Look, give me a chance to
    try to push a policy that will provide opportunity to every responsible
    citizen and will bring all people together in one community, that will
    allow us to be pro-business and pro-labor, pro-environment and pro-
    growth, get rid of the deficit but continue to invest in education.''

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        And it was just an argument, but the American people decided to give
    us a chance, probably, frankly, because the country was in such tough
    shape. It was really tough.
        Well, after 6 years, it's not an argument anymore. There is now
    evidence. And I'm very proud that with the help of the Democratic
    Members of the Senate, without whom none of this would have been
    possible, we now have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the
    lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years,
    the highest homeownership in history, the first back-to-back balanced
    budget surpluses in 42 years, and the longest economic expansion in
    peacetime in our history, with over 19 million new jobs. It's not an
    argument anymore.
        Now, the issue before the American people is, some say, whether we
    should change. That is not the question. We are going to change. This
    country's been changing for over 200 years; that's why we're still here.
    We're adaptable. We always have new challenges. We always have new
    opportunities. The question is not whether we'll change; the question is
    how we're going to change.
        We can take a U-turn and go back to the policies that got us in
    trouble in the first place. I've tried to stop those. Some of the most
    important achievements of the last 6 years involved stopping the
    Contract With America, stopping this ill-advised, huge tax cut that I
    vetoed, which, by the way, would have made it utterly impossible to do
    what we ought to do in Medicare.
        But I would just ask you as citizens to think about the big things
    we can do now because of the country's prosperity. And let me just
    mention three. And it's time to think about the big things.
        Big thing number one that all of you deal with in health care, we've
    got to deal with the aging of America. People are living longer, and the
    number of people over 65 will double in 30 years. I hope to be one of
    them. And we have a chance and, I would argue, and obligation to save
    Social Security and push the life of Social Security out beyond the life
    expectancy of the whole baby boom generation. We can do that now.
        We have an obligation not only to properly fund Medicare but to
    extend the life of it and to add a prescription drug benefit. I was just
    asked again today about all these people who live in New York, Vermont,
    Maine, along the Canadian border, going across the border to Canada to
    buy American drugs much cheaper than they can buy them in America. If we
    would give people on Medicare the option, purely the option, to buy into
    a prescription drug program that could use market power to get discount
    prices, we could deal with the problems of 75 percent of the seniors in
    this country that don't have access to those pharmaceuticals now. I
    think it's important.
        That's big challenge number one. Big challenge number two, as New
    York knows, we have the largest and most diverse student population in
    our schools in history. We have done everything we could with the HOPE
    scholarships and other aids to give everybody who can go access to
    college. But no one believes that we're giving a world-class education
    to every child in K through 12 yet.
        So it's time to build them modern schools and give them more
    teachers and have high standards but give them access to summer school
    and after-school and mentoring programs, so you don't declare the kids
    failures when the system is failing them.
        This is important. We ought to say, ``We're not going to rest until
    the children in our public schools have the same access to quality
    education that children in our institutions of higher education do.''
    That's a big idea worth fighting for.
        The third thing I'd like to say is, we need to think about the 21st
    century economy. As you know here, from upstate New York to some
    neighborhoods in New York City, not everybody has participated in our
    prosperity. As a matter of fact, part of the problems our hospitals have
    today is that not everybody has participated in our prosperity. You
    still have a lot of poor people who can't afford to pay who have to have
    care.
        I have offered the American people, from the empowerment zone
    program in 1993 to our new markets initiative now, a way to bring more
    people into our enterprise system. I think people with money in America
    ought to get the same tax breaks and other incentives to invest in poor
    areas in America we today give them to invest in Latin America and the
    Caribbean and Africa. I don't want to take those other incentives away,
    but I think you ought to have the same option to grow a business here
    you do in our poor countries to the south and around the world.

    [[Page 1715]]

        And finally, I think we ought to get this country out of debt for
    the first time since 1835. We can do that in 15 years. Now, anybody in
    this room over 40 who took economics in college was taught that a
    country should always be a little bit in debt, that somehow that's
    healthy. And when we learned it, it was true. It's not true anymore for
    rich countries because interest rates are set globally, and if we can
    make America debt-free over the next 15 years, it means lower interest
    rates for business loans, for hospital construction, for college loans,
    for home loans, for car loans. It means more jobs and higher incomes. It
    means when our friends around the world who have to buy the things we
    produce get in trouble, they can borrow money to get out of trouble at a
    lower cost. It could ensure a generation of prosperity. We can do it
    now. We should think big.
        Now, let me just mention one final issue. I could talk about this
    all night, because I want America to start thinking big about it. We
    have the lowest crime rate in 26 years, and I'm proud of that. And it's
    nationwide in every big city--we're seeing--with the same strategies
    there that have worked here, community policing and careful targeting of
    certain kinds of crime in certain areas. But no one thinks it's as low
    as it ought to be. No one thinks America is as safe as it ought to be.
    So I would like to see people stand up and say, ``Okay, we've got the
    lowest crime rate in 26 years. Now we need a real goal. Let's make
    America the safest big country in the world.'' If we're the most
    prosperous big country in the world, if we have more freedom than
    anybody else in the world, we ought to be able to make it the safest big
    country in the world.
        We have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. We
    have to do more to keep guns out of the hands of children who die at an
    accidental rate--listen to this--accidental rate from gun deaths in
    America, 9 times higher than the next 25 industrial countries in the
    world combined. But we can do it if we make up our mind to do it.
        In closing, let me say the other thing that I'm proud to be a
    Democrat about, besides these big ideas, is that we stand for the idea
    that we can be one America across all the racial, religious, gender,
    sexual orientation, and other lines that divide us. We believe our
    common humanity is more important than our differences, which make life
    interesting, but which are not fundamental to our common cause.
        If you look at all the trouble we've had in the world in the last 20
    years, just the trouble we've had in the world in the last 6\1/2\ years
    since I've been President, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, to
    Bosnia and Kosovo, to the tribal wars in Africa, our continuing
    inability to get over our fear, loathing, and dehumanization of people
    who are different from us is the number one problem the world has. And
    it is quite interesting, as we deal with the miracles of modern
    medicine, the miracles of the modern Internet, we look forward to the
    human genome project, giving every mother a map of her baby's life when
    she goes home from the hospital, we are beset by the most primitive of
    all human problems, the continuing fear of people who are different from
    us.
        I can just tell you that the people that we're running and the
    policies that will be followed--and you know, I'm not running for
    anything. I'm selling this as a prospective citizen and what I want for
    my daughter and my grandchildren's generation. We'll stand up for one
    America, and we'll change. But we don't want a U-turn. We've got this
    country going in the right direction, and we want to reach for the
    stars.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:50 p.m. in the penthouse of the McGraw-
    Hill Building. In his remarks, he referred to Dennis Rivera, president,
    National Health and Human Services Employees Union Local 1199.