    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 19 (Monday, May 16, 1994)]
    [Pages 1029-1032]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks to the Community in Warwick, Rhode Island

    May 9, 1994

        The President. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Senator
    Pell, Congressman Reed, Governor Sundlun. And thank you, ladies and
    gentlemen, for such a wonderful welcome. It's good to be back in Rhode
    Island and to see so many of you here.
        Governor Sundlun thanked me for our quick approval of Rhode Island's
    plan to extend health care to pregnant women and to young children. I
    thank him and the people of Rhode Island for putting this plan together.
        Our administration has granted more initiatives for more States than
    any in history, but few as good as the one from Rhode Island to try to
    help the health care of your little children. And I congratulate you on
    that.
        I also want to say a special word of thanks to Senator Pell for his
    leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his work with
    me on some of the most difficult issues of our time. In the last year,
    we have succeeded in opening up the United States in trade areas,
    investment areas, in ways that were literally not even thought of just a
    little while ago.
        We also have continued our work to make the world safer. When I
    became President there were four countries in the former Soviet Union
    with nuclear weapons. Now three have agreed to give them up and are
    giving them up. And the nuclear arsenal in Russia is no longer pointed
    at the United States, nor are our missiles pointed at them. I thank
    Senator Pell for his support of that.
        Finally, I want to thank your Congressman for his leadership in the
    Goals 2000 legislation that I signed a few weeks ago, which establishes
    national standards for our public schools and supports grassroots
    reforms to achieve those standards for the first time in American
    history, and for his courage in leading the United States House of
    Representatives to vote to ban the 19 serious assault weapons that are
    used for killing people on our streets.
        I want to thank your Lieutenant Governor, your State treasurer, your
    attorney general, the State democratic chairman, and the Mayor of
    Providence, Lincoln Chafee, all of them for being here today. What?
        Gov. Bruce Sundlun. The mayor of Warwick.
        The President. The mayor of Warwick--I'm sorry.
        Governor Sundlun. He's John Chafee's son.
        The President. Yes, the Governor says he's John Chafee's son, I know
    that. And I want to thank John Chafee for having a health care bill that
    covers all Americans. I'm going to work with them, and we're going

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    to have a bipartisan health care reform this year if I can possibly get
    it done.
        Ladies and gentlemen, I ran for President because I wanted to change
    the country, working with you, because I wanted it moved beyond the
    politics of gridlock in Washington, all the partisan rhetoric, all the
    arguing over left and right, all the politics of delay and distraction
    and destruction, to try to move this country forward again and pull our
    country together again. I thought we could do it with three simple
    words: a commitment to opportunity for all Americans, an insistence on
    responsibility from all Americans, and a belief that we were one
    community, that we are all in this together. I thought we could do it by
    rebuilding the value of work and the strength of our families, by
    pulling together at the national level and at the grassroots. And we
    have made a good beginning.
        Last year, in a very tough fight, the United States Congress had the
    courage to pass our economic program which brought down the deficit,
    kept interest rates down, got investments up. I'm happy to report that
    in the first 4 months of this year, we've seen a million new jobs come
    into this economy, 3 million in all in the first 15 months of this
    administration; 8 thousand new jobs in Rhode Island, the first job
    growth in 4 years in this State. We are well on our way to meeting our
    goal of 8 million jobs in this 4-year period.
        We also, if the Congress passes the budget I have presented this
    year, will not only increase funding for education, training,
    technology, and medical research, we will reduce overall domestic
    spending and defense spending for the first time since 1969. And we will
    have 3 years of reduction in the deficit for the first time since Harry
    Truman was President. No more rhetoric; action for the American people.
        Our administration is breaking new ground in education. We've
    reformed the college loan program to lower interest rates and to improve
    the repayment schedule for our young people. We passed the bill to have
    national standards for schools. We passed a bill to set up a network in
    every State in the country for the young people who graduate from high
    school who don't go on to 4-year colleges but do need further education
    and training. And we are going to reform the unemployment system in this
    country to make it a reemployment system. And we're going to change the
    welfare system to end welfare as we know it. We can do these things if
    we keep working ahead.
        I'm proud of the work our administration has done to strengthen the
    American families that are out there struggling to make ends meet and
    raise their children, with the Family and Medical Leave Act, with an
    earned-income tax credit increase in this year's tax year which will
    dramatically enable more and more working people on modest wages to stay
    out of poverty, to stay off welfare by cutting their taxes. One in six
    working families in America will be eligible for a reduction in income
    taxes this year, so they can support their children and be successful
    workers at the same time. That is the kind of thing we ought to be doing
    in this country.
        Finally, let me say we are trying to rebuild the bonds of the
    American community in many ways but with two great initiatives. The
    first one you can see by the signs over here: the national service
    program. Ladies and gentlemen, this fall when school starts, 20,000
    young Americans will be eligible to earn money for furthering their
    education after high school by working at the grassroots level in their
    communities in programs to solve the problems of America at the
    grassroots. National service will sweep America. The year after next, we
    will have 100,000 young Americans earning money on their education,
    solving the problems of America at the grassroots level.
        The other thing we're trying to do, which will be done in a few
    weeks to strengthen our American communities is to pass the most
    sweeping, most effective, most comprehensive crime bill in the history
    of the United States: 100,000 more police officers for our streets;
    innovative forms of punishment; real funds for prevention to help our
    young people avoid crime, to have something to say yes to as well as
    something to say no to; and finally, after that tough battle, finally a
    ban on those assault weapons which are meant to kill people, not go
    hunting with.
        My fellow Americans, we are changing the landscape in America by
    moving beyond

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    rhetoric to reality in dealing with the real problems and the real
    opportunities of the real people in this country. But we will never do
    what we need to do to rebuild community, to support family, to have a
    responsible budget, and to build a responsible future until we guarantee
    health care security to all the American people.
        We are spending 40 percent more on health care than any other
    country in the world. We are the only advanced country in the world that
    does not cover all of its citizens. We have 100,000 Americans a month
    losing their health insurance for good. We have 58 million Americans in
    any given year who don't have health insurance part of the year. We have
    81 million Americans who live in families where there is a child with
    diabetes, a mother with premature cancer, a father with an early heart
    condition, and they can never get health insurance or they pay more than
    they can afford or they can never change their jobs because of the
    cursed preexisting conditions which are paralyzing family life for tens
    of millions of Americans. Three quarters of American people have health
    insurance policies that have lifetime limits so that if anything should
    happen to them or their children, when they need it most they might lose
    their coverage.
        Small businesses pay 35 to 40 percent more for their health
    insurance premiums than those of us insured by Government or big
    business. My fellow Americans, no one can justify an administrative
    system which costs tens of billions of dollars in sheer paperwork, more
    than any other system in the world. Why? Because we are the only country
    in the world that has, in spite of the best doctors, the best nurses,
    the best health care, the best research, and the best technology, 1,500
    separate companies writing thousands and thousands and thousands of
    policies on little bitty groups, and employing hundreds of thousands of
    people in doctors' offices and hospitals and insurance companies to see
    who is not covered and what is not covered. We are spending billions of
    dollars to figure out how not to provide health care to our people, when
    we ought to be covering all Americans. If other countries can do it, the
    United States can do it as well.
        Our goal is simple. By the end of the year, I expect to sign a law
    that guarantees Americans, every American, private health insurance that
    can never be taken away.
        My wife and I have received about a million letters from people all
    over the country. They're people just like those of you in this
    audience. They may be some of you in this audience. Most of them aren't
    organized in any way, so they can't make their voices heard in
    Washington. But they're out there in every community and every
    workplace. I received a letter from Anthony Catuto and his wife, a young
    disabled couple whose Medicare coverage doesn't pay for the prescription
    drugs they need. They come from Rhode Island, and they just met me on
    the tarmac. They deserve the ability to take care of their children. I
    just met, out there on the tarmac, a relatively new resident of Rhode
    Island, Anne Hood, and her wonderful child. She was a self-employed
    writer from New York. And when she and her husband moved to Providence
    and had a baby, her insurance company dropped her coverage without even
    letting her know.
        Let me tell you--let me tell you, I'm going to wait for the plane to
    go by. [Laughter] I just met three people in New York who had written me
    these letters. One of them, no health insurance for their child; another
    with a dangerous medical diagnosis, not pursuing the diagnosis even
    though it could be a life-threatening illness because they had no health
    insurance.
        I was in Columbus, Ohio, the other day. I met a wonderful woman who
    ran a delicatessen with 20 part-time employees and 20 full-time
    employees. And she said, ``I am the embodiment of everything that is not
    right with this system, and I have a good insurance person who's done a
    good job of giving me the most inexpensive insurance they can get. I had
    cancer 5 years ago. I insure my full-time employees. We pay way too much
    in our deductibles, and our co-pays are too high. I cannot afford to
    insure my part-time employees. I feel guilty that I don't insure my
    part-time employees, and I'm mad that none of my competitors insure
    their full-time employees. I'm paying for them as well as for my own.''
    We can do better.

    [[Page 1032]]

        Hundreds and hundreds of business people have told me that sort of
    thing. Today in New York, I was in the 10th largest retail grocery chain
    in the United States of America, and every one of their employees has
    comprehensive health benefits. And they said, ``If we can do it, why
    can't all the other people in our business?'' That's the kind of
    attitude we need in this country, people taking responsibility for
    themselves, their employees, and their future.
        Ladies and gentlemen, this is not going to be easy. Six Presidents
    have tried over 60 years to solve the health care crisis in America, and
    we have not done it. But this year we can do it with the same kind of
    courage that finally turned the deficit around, with the same kind of
    courage in the Congress that finally took on the interest groups for the
    assault weapons ban, with the same kind of courage that broke a 7-year
    deadlock for family and medical leave, a 7-year deadlock for the Brady
    bill, a 5-year deadlock on this crime bill. Let's do it in one year for
    health care and finally put this issue behind us.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:55 p.m. at the T.F. Green Airport. In his
    remarks, he referred to Lt. Gov. Robert Weygand; State Attorney General
    Jeffrey Pine; State Secretary of the Treasury Nancy Mayer; and Guy
    Dufault, Rhode Island Democratic State chairman.