[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 22 (Monday, June 7, 1999)]
[Pages 1042-1046]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Presenting the President's Committee on Employment of People 
With Disabilities Awards

June 4, 1999

Situation in the Balkans

    The President. Thank you very much, Jill. Secretary Herman; Chairman 
Coelho; Mr. Dart; to Janice Lachance, head of our Office of Personnel 
Management. Ladies and gentlemen, I have looked forward to this day, and 
I am delighted to see you all here. I'll have more to say about the 
others who are up here with me in a moment.
    This is my only opportunity to appear before the press today, so I 
hope you will also indulge me if I say a few words about the recent 
developments in Kosovo. For 72 days now we have been engaged with our 
Allies in a difficult but just and necessary military campaign, with 
three simple goals: the return of over 800,000 innocent Kosovar refugees 
to their homes, with safety and self-government; the withdrawal of Serb 
forces; and the deployment of an international security force, with NATO 
at its core, to protect all the people of that shattered land.
    Yesterday the Serbian authorities indicated they would accept those 
conditions. Russian Special Envoy Chernomyrdin and Finnish President 
Ahtisaari played instrumental and courageous roles in making this 
possible. I am grateful to them, and so should all Americans be.
    Tomorrow military officials from NATO and Serbia will meet to work 
out the details

[[Page 1043]]

of the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo. This is the next 
necessary step for implementation of our conditions. I'm pleased that it 
will take place, and I hope the talks will proceed professionally and 
expeditiously.
    As I said yesterday, our diplomatic and military efforts will 
continue until we see Serb forces begin to withdraw in a full-scale 
manner. Our experience in the Balkans teaches us that true peace can 
only come when progress in discussions is followed by progress on the 
ground.
    At the same time, there is an enormous opportunity to be seized 
here, a chance to shift our focus from defeating something evil to 
building something good; a chance to work with our Allies to bring a 
stable and prosperous and democratic southeastern Europe, in which 
people are never again singled out for destruction simply because of 
their religious faith or their ethnic origin. This is a goal that has 
been worth fighting for over the last weeks, a goal which must be 
uppermost in our minds as we make sure our conditions are met, a goal we 
must work for with steadfast determination in the months and in the 
years to come.
    And I believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans share this 
goal. We do not want our children to grow up in a world which is 
dominated by people who believe they can kill innocent civilians because 
of the way they worship God or the way they were born.

Disability Employment Awards

    Fifty years ago Harry Truman, the very first President to present 
the awards that we present today, set a goal for our Nation. I'd like to 
repeat it: to give every American with a disability the chance to play 
their full part in strengthening our Nation and sharing the greatest 
satisfaction of American life, to be independent and self-supporting.
    Today we gather to honor three Americans whose efforts to bring more 
and more people with disabilities into the world of work have moved us 
closer to that great and just goal. Since the founding of our Nation, 
work has been at the heart of the American dream. Because millions of 
Americans have had the opportunity to work and to build better lives for 
themselves and their families, our Nation is enjoying historic strength 
and prosperity. Through work, we reinforce the values that hold us 
together as a society, the values of responsibility, perserverance, 
striving for the future.
    And in so many ways, we define ourselves as Americans not only by 
our families and our hometowns but by our work. Often, the first 
question Americans ask each other is not, who are your parents or where 
do you live but what do you do. Today, still, there are too many 
Americans with disabilities who've never had the chance to answer that 
question. Even as we celebrate more than 18 million new jobs and a 
nationwide unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, the lowest in a generation, 
as the Secretary has said, 75 percent of Americans with disabilities 
remain unemployed. And of that number, 72 percent, almost three-
quarters, say they want to go to work.
    This is not just a missed opportunity for Americans with 
disabilities. It's a missed opportunity for America. This is an era now 
of labor shortages, where companies go begging for employees they need 
to stay competitive in the global economy. And we simply cannot afford 
to ignore the potential of millions of potential workers simply because 
they have a disability.
    One of the things I have spent a great deal of time on in the last 
year, particularly, is trying to work with my economic advisers on 
issues that only peripherally involve the disability community but that 
you are a central part of resolving. And it is this: How can we continue 
to grow this economy and lift the standards of living of our people 
until we embrace everybody who has not participated in the recovery; 
keep the recovery going, which is already the longest peacetime recovery 
in history, and not have an explosion of inflation?
    There are--if you think about it, there are only, I would argue to 
you, three possible answers to that. You either have to get more workers 
who are unemployed, generally, in the society, into the work force so 
that they not only are helping themselves but helping the rest of us by 
becoming consumers and taxpayers and growing the economy; you have to go 
to those discreet areas where

[[Page 1044]]

whole areas have been left out of our economic growth; or you have to 
find more customers for America's goods and services around the world.
    Therefore, I have continued to push the idea of the expansion of 
trade on fair and just terms. I have promoted the empowerment zones that 
the Vice President has so ably led our efforts in for the last 6\1/2\ 
years, and this new markets initiative, to reach into the rural areas, 
the urban communities, the Native American reservations where there has 
been almost no economic growth. We have cut the welfare rolls almost in 
half, trying to move able-bodied people from welfare to work.
    The last big chunk of people in this country who could keep the 
economy going for all of us, with low inflation, are the Americans with 
disabilities, who want to work, who can work, and who are not in the 
work force. Every American citizen should have a selfish interest in the 
pursuit of this goal in the most aggressive possible way.
    As everybody here knows--and Secretary Herman already mentioned it--
one of the very largest obstacles to employment for Americans with 
disabilities is the fear that they'll lose their health insurance once 
they take a job--that which is provided by the Federal Government. Not 
so very long ago, I went in February to New Hampshire and had a 
roundtable about this, where people were explicitly discussing this in 
graphic terms, giving through the press to the American people dollars-
and-cents reports on what the consequences of this would be.
    Under current law, many people with disabilities simply can't work 
and keep Medicare or Medicaid. For many Americans, medical bills 
literally cost thousands of dollars beyond what is typically covered by 
an employer's private insurance. For many Americans, their medical bills 
would be greater than their entire salary.
    Therefore, we keep a lot of people out of the work force. But we 
don't save the Federal Government any money, because they're spending 
the money anyway, on the health care. So we deny opportunities to 
millions; we prevent the American economy from reaching its full 
potential; we don't save the Federal Treasury one red cent, because the 
health care money is being spent anyway.
    Today, as a country, it is time to say that no American should have 
to choose between going to work and paying the medical bills. Last 
summer, and in the State of the Union, I asked Congress to free our 
fellow Americans from this unfair burden. The ``Work Incentive 
Improvement Act,'' sponsored by Senators Jeffords and Kennedy, Senators 
Roth and Moynihan, and a wide group of sponsors in both Houses, from 
both parties, will do just that. There are, at last count, over 70 
Members of the Senate who have signed on to the bill.
    There has been a lot of commentary lately about how hard it is to 
get legislation through the Congress, with the partisan divide. Well, 
there are a lot if issues on which Republicans and Democrats have honest 
disagreements. Thank goodness this is not one of them. Because it is not 
one of them, because we already have over 70 people who say they will 
vote for this if they can just get a chance to vote for it on the floor 
of the Senate, I am confident that we can work together to pass the work 
incentives bill by July the 26th of this year, the 9th anniversary of 
the Americans with Disabilities Act.
    We can celebrate that great, historic, bipartisan landmark by 
opening the doors of opportunity for millions of people even wider, 
enabling more Americans with disabilities to join the proud ranks of 
working citizens.
    There is more, I would argue, that we should do. In my balanced 
budget presented to the Congress, I proposed a $1,000 tax credit to help 
people with disabilities afford special transportation technology, which 
you've already heard about, or personal assistance needed to make the 
transition to work. And we must double our efforts to make assistive 
technology, such as voice recognition software, mobile telephones, 
braille translators, more widely available. So I ask Congress to move 
forward with both of these proposals in my budget.
    And today I am taking immediate action to give more Americans with 
disabilities the opportunity to become part of the largest work force in 
America. On Monday the First Lady, the Vice President, and Mrs. Gore and

[[Page 1045]]

I will be hosting a White House Conference on Mental Health, an area 
that has been a special concern, as I'm sure many of you know, to Mrs. 
Gore for many years. One of our goals is to help more Americans 
understand that mental illness is not a character flaw. It is a 
disability.
    That is why today I am using my executive authority as President to 
strip away outdated barriers that keep people with psychiatric 
disabilities from serving America in our Federal Government, directing 
all Federal agencies to provide applicants with mental illnesses the 
same opportunities as other applicants with disabilities to work for the 
United States of America.
    As you know, and as we see here today, not only the Government, but 
individual citizens can take action and make an enormous difference. The 
three citizens we honor today are proof of the difference one person can 
make, and I am proud to present these awards to each of them.
    First, to Joyce Bender. Fifteen years ago, as Joyce lay in a 
hospital trauma unit, recovering from a near-fatal cerebral hemorrhage, 
she made a vow to give something back to the patients who were not so 
lucky. Through Bender Consulting Services, she's used her own expertise 
as a professional headhunter to place people with disabilities in high-
wage, high-tech jobs.
    She knows the demand for high-skill workers will only continue to 
grow, and she is determined to make sure people with disabilities will 
be ready to meet it. She's founded a new program to train even more 
people with disabilities in the high-tech skills that are the ticket to 
the world of the 21st century.
    It's an honor to present this award to Joyce Bender. Joyce.

[The President presented the award and congratulated Ms. Bender.]

    The President. Next, to James Click, Jr. Over more than 30 years as 
a car dealer in California and Arizona, Jim Click has become an 
undisputed leader in his field. But he's also unrivaled in his 
commitment to extending opportunity to people with disabilities.
    A few years ago, he discovered he could encourage more businesses to 
follow his lead by making it easier for them to find workers with the 
right skills. So he founded LINKAGES, which brings Tucson businesses and 
rehabilitation programs together to match qualified workers with 
disabilities to jobs in the private sector.
    In a little over a year, more than 170 people have found work 
through LINKAGES. It's an honor to present this award to Jim Click and 
hope others will follow his lead in every community in the country.

[The President presented the award and congratulated Mr. Click.]

    The President. Finally, to Laura Hershey. Laura has said, and I 
quote, ``Disability is not a tragedy. It is powerful.''
    By speaking her mind, and using her gifts as a writer to point out 
the shortcomings and the possibilities of our society, Laura has found 
the power to make the world a better place for people with disabilities. 
As head of a variety of disability organizations, and as a private 
citizen, she has fought to reform our Social Security, housing and 
transportation systems to better serve Americans living with 
disabilities.
    Economic freedom and self-sufficiency for Americans with 
disabilities is her goal. I am confident she will not rest until she 
achieves it. And I am proud to present this third and final award to 
Laura Hershey.

[The President presented the award and congratulated Ms. Hershey.]

    The President. So there you have them: a high-tech headhunter from 
Pittsburgh, a car dealer from Tucson, an activist from Denver. Now, if 
you didn't see them you might think, just by those descriptions, that 
these people have little in common. But they are bound together by their 
remarkable passion for empowering Americans with disabilities and 
helping all Americans to live closer to the ideal of equal opportunity 
for all. Each is, therefore, a true patriot.
    President Truman once said, ``We love our country because it offers 
us the chance to lead useful lives and to do what we can for those 
around us.''
    I thank each of you for reminding us that, really, those two things 
are two sides of the same coin. We cannot truly lead useful lives

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unless we also do what we can for those around us. This is a good day 
for America.
    Thank you. God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Jill Rickgauer, participant in the 
LINKAGES program, which links employees with disabled job seekers; Tony 
Coelho, Chairman, President's Committee on Employment of People with 
Disabilities; Justin Dart, Jr., chairman and founder, Justice For All; 
President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland; and Special Envoy and former 
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia.