[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

[[Page 1030]]

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

[[Page 1031]]

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.