[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 43 (Monday, October 26, 1998)]
[Pages 2083-2086]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Funding for Breast Cancer Research

October 21, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here with 
this distinguished panel of people, and I hope I can communicate a 
little bit of what we've tried to do in this area in just a few moments. 
As all of you know, I think, I have been spending most of the last week 
in the Middle East peace talks at Wye Plantation on the Eastern Shore. 
And when I conclude my remarks, I have to go take a call from Secretary 
Albright and see if I'm going back. So I hope you'll forgive me for 
leaving.
    Let me say I'm delighted to be here with all of you. I thank all of 
you for your work. I am glad to see Senator Jeffords here. I used to 
refer to Senator Jeffords as my favorite Republican, and then I was 
informed that I had endangered his committee chairmanship and his 
physical well-being. [Laughter] So I never do that anymore, but I'm 
honored to have you back in the White House, Senator. And Mayor Beverly 
O'Neill from Long Beach, California, thank you for coming. And to all 
the rest of you.
    Twenty-five years ago America declared war on cancer. Twenty-five 
years from now

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we have a good chance to have won the war. I hope the war on cancer 25 
years from now will have about as much meaning to children in school as 
the War of 1812. I hope school children don't even know what 
chemotherapy means.
    For nearly 6 years, we have worked hard to bring us closer to that 
day. We've helped cancer patients to keep their health coverage when 
they change jobs, accelerated the approval of cancer drugs while 
maintaining high standards of safety, continually increased funding for 
cancer research.
    Recently, I named Dr. Jane Henney, the first woman and the first 
oncologist to be the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. 
And I am pleased to report that about 2 hours ago she was actually 
confirmed by the United States Senate.
    Thanks to the work of a lot of you in this room, we have made 
genuine progress. We're closing in on the genetic causes of breast 
cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, and now testing medicines to 
actually prevent those cancers. New tools for screening and diagnosis 
are returning to many patients the promise of a long and healthy life. 
From 1991 to 1995, cancer death rates actually dropped for the first 
time in history.
    I'm especially proud of the 5 years of progress we've made in 
prevention, detection, and treatment of breast cancer. Not one day goes 
by that I don't think about my mother and, through her, all the other 
women in this country who have had that dreaded disease. It requires 
more than courage to deal with it. We all owe it to ourselves and our 
future to make the sustained commitment to research that, once and for 
all, can win this war.
    Without research, there would be no mammography. Without research, 
there would be no genetic testing for vulnerability to breast cancer. 
Without research, there would be no--how do you pronounce that----
    Audience members.  Tamoxifen.
    The President. ----tamoxifen. I practiced this twice this morning. 
[Laughter] But since then, my chain of thought has been interrupted. 
[Laughter] Anyway, we wouldn't have it without research. [Laughter]
    This afternoon, before I came over here, I signed the balanced 
budget that we fought so hard in the last days of this Congress. It has, 
among other things, breakthrough funding for cancer research and a 
general, large increase in research funding for our country's future, a 
part of the commitment that Hillary and I made when we ask Americans to 
honor the millennium by honoring our past and envisioning our future.
    I'm pleased that the new budget includes a record increase of $400 
million in new support for the National Cancer Institute. With nearly $3 
billion in funding, NCI now will be able to fund critical new research, 
including a trial to expand the use of Herceptin to treat breast cancer 
earlier and 10 more new clinical trials for breast cancer treatment. 
This is an important victory for women's health. It reflects a balanced 
budget that honors our values. And this, as in so many other things, I 
also would like to thank the Vice President, who spearheaded our drive 
to get the research funding into the budget.
    If you will, I'd like to mention just a couple of other ways that 
this budget strengthens our Nation. First, it honors our duty of fiscal 
responsibility. It is a budget surplus that we now enjoy for the first 
time in nearly three decades, the largest in our history. And despite 
the temptations here just before an election to spend it on tax cuts and 
new spending programs, the budget actually meets my challenge to set 
aside the surplus until we save Social Security for the 21st century.
    It also provides funding within the balanced budget to begin to hire 
100,000 new teachers to reduce class size in the early grades, thousands 
of tutors to help children read, up to 100,000 mentors to help poor 
children prepare for college, after-school programs to give a quarter of 
a million children someplace to learn instead of the streets, a half a 
million summer jobs to teach young people the discipline and joy of 
work.
    The budget strengthens our Nation in other ways as well. It will 
bolster our own prosperity and help us to meet our responsibilities to 
deal with the global economy turmoil by meeting our obligations to the 
International Monetary Fund. It actually strengthens the protection of 
the environment. It

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guarantees safer water, cleaner air, more pristine public lands. It will 
help struggling farmers who face natural disasters and dramatically 
declining markets as a result of the trouble in Asia.
    We had to fight for each of these priorities, and the budget is not 
perfect. You know, I lost the line item veto in our court case, and 
there's a lot of little things tucked away there that I wish weren't in 
that budget. But on balance, it honors our values and strengthens our 
country and looks to the future.
    Now, I believe that it's important to point out, too, that if we had 
the right sort of spirit throughout the year, we wouldn't have had to 
cram a year's worth of work into a 4,000-page, 40-pound document passed 
several days after the budget year had run out. There are still some 
elements of partisanship that I would like to note in the hope that they 
can be removed.
    In the past few days, the Congress persisted in tying our United 
Nations dues to unrelated and controversial social provisions, which 
endanger the health of women and deny them even basic information about 
family planning, even though studies show that countries where women 
have access to strong family planning actually have fewer abortions.
    I've made it clear many times that I will veto such provisions. 
Congress sent me the bill to fund our arrears to the United Nations, 
knowing full well I would do so. So today I did. I regret that. I 
regret, too, that the 105th Congress leaves town with unfinished 
business, challenges that must be met in the coming months and years to 
strengthen our families and our Nation.
    The next Congress must pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. I might 
say there is bipartisan support for this, just not enough to get it by. 
Our plan says to cancer patients and all Americans: You should have the 
right to a specialist, such as an oncologist; you should not have to 
worry that you will have to change doctors in the middle of a cancer 
treatment if your employer changes health care providers; you should 
have a right to an independent appeals process if critical treatment is 
delayed or denied. Managed care or traditional care, every American 
should have quality care.
    The next Congress should act in other ways to strengthen the health 
of women. This year I asked Congress to cover clinical trials for 
Medicare beneficiaries so they, too, can get cutting edge treatment. 
[Applause] Thank you. And I asked Congress to outlaw discrimination 
based on the results of genetic screening. Both these measures failed to 
pass. The next Congress should pass them. The next Congress should also 
meet our obligations to our children by modernizing our schools. And 
above all, the next Congress must be the Congress that acts to save 
Social Security.
    This year we had a series of bipartisan forums around the country on 
how to reform Social Security to meet the burdens that will be there 
when the baby boomers retire, and we'll only have about two people 
working for every one person drawing Social Security. We're going to 
have a national conference in December. We were successful in saving the 
surplus until we could consider the cost in future years of reforming 
Social Security.
    Social Security lifted a generation of elderly Americans from 
poverty. Today, even though most Americans have other sources of income 
who draw Social Security, fully one-half of our seniors would be in 
poverty without it. So here at the White House on Friday we will talk 
about the vital importance of Social Security, especially to women, who 
have fewer pensions and smaller savings.
    If we want to keep this commitment as strong for our children as it 
was for our parents, and if we want to see the baby boomers retire in 
dignity without imposing unfair burdens on our children and their 
ability to raise our grandchildren, we must act now.
    I must say, I was disappointed a couple of days ago that the Senate 
majority leader said he may not now want to join me in reforming Social 
Security next year. If we don't, then there will be more pressure to 
squander this money on tax cuts or spending programs. I think that is 
unhelpful. We know that we can make modest changes now that have a huge 
impact down the road, in much the way that modest investments in 
research now have a huge impact down the road on health care. And I 
believe this is an issue which really binds the American people, not 
only across generations but across political

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parties. None of us--none of us--wants to leave a legacy of burdening 
our children to support our retirement or risking that those of us who, 
unlike me, won't have a good pension, will face an undignified and 
impoverished old age just because the demographics are changing in 
America. So we need progress, not partisanship, on Social Security.
    Now, there are 436 days left in this millennium. It can--it should 
be a time when we redouble our efforts to honor our parents, to 
strengthen our Nation, to prepare for our children's future, and to 
honor the tenacity and courage that those of you here have shown every 
day in dealing with this great challenge.
    Again, let me say, I am very proud of what this budget did for 
cancer research. I'm very proud of what we are doing together to deal 
with the challenge of breast cancer. I want you to know that, that I 
believe that we are within reach of genuine cures and genuine prevention 
strategies of stunning impact. And we have to remember that on the 
things that really count, whether it's cancer research or saving Social 
Security or educating our children, this country needs to be united. 
This country needs to be reconciled to one another, all of us, across 
all the lines that divide us. There are plenty of things to fight about. 
But on the fundamental things, we need to be one. That is, 
parenthetically, the argument I've been making for a week out at the 
Middle East peace talks.
    The only way that life ever really works is when we understand that 
the only victories that have lasting impacts are not victories over 
other people but victories for our common humanity. And that's what I'm 
going to work for now. To me, that's what every day your struggle 
against breast cancer symbolizes. And I'm very grateful to all of you.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 4:15 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House.