[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

[[Page 1713]]

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.''

[[Page 1714]]

    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.