[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 18 (Monday, May 8, 2000)]
[Pages 961-967]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to Independent Insurance Agents of America's National 
Legislative Conference

May 2, 2000

    The President.  Thank you very, very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I 
am delighted to be here. And I thank you, President Houston, and I thank 
your CEO, Paul Equale, whom I see all the time here in Washington 
pleading your cause. And I thank my old friend George Frazier. I heard 
that introduction. The truth is that only he and my mother thought I had 
a chance to be elected President when I ran. [Laughter] But it's nice to 
have someone like that in your corner.
    I came here today, in part, on a sentimental journey. I couldn't 
hear everything George said, but the first speech I gave outside 
Arkansas as an elected official was in 1977, when I flew to California 
to speak for George when he was president of your organization. So, in a 
real sense, my political career began with George Frazier's presidency 
and ended with my own. And I am delighted to be here.
    I also want to acknowledge and thank another member of this group 
from Arkansas, my friend Lib Carlisle, who agreed to become chairman of 
the Democratic Party when I was reelected Governor in 1982. I told him 
that it would just be about a half-a-day-a-week job. The truth was he 
had about a half a day a week left to devote to this job. And I'm 
surprised as a result of his public service that he could afford the 
airplane ticket up here. [Laughter] But I am delighted that he and all 
of you are here.
    I also want to say I'm glad I got here for a few minutes of Senator 
Hatch's speech. Believe it or not, we're good friends. [Laughter] And 
it's nearly ruined him in the Republican caucus. [Laughter] And so he 
has to give me a little grief when he shows up. I would say in my own 
defense that it is true that tax receipts--I heard him talking about the 
tax burden--it is true that tax receipts as a percentage of national 
income are up. But the reason is, unemployment is low and incomes have 
grown so much. The actual percentage of income being paid by middle 
income families is the lowest it's been in over 35 years. So I think 
that's worth pointing out.
    I also would say, on the education issue--I heard what he said about 
burden of regulations--the Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, who was 
Governor of South Carolina for many years, has cut two-thirds of the 
regulations and paperwork burdens on local school districts that existed 
when we became the new administration in 1993. And in fact, our 
administration, even though we've had to promulgate some new regulations 
over the whole Federal Government, has gotten rid of more regulations, 
some 16,000 pages of them, in every Federal agency than were eliminated 
in the previous 12 years. And we have the smallest Government since 
1960. So I think the record will look pretty good on that score.
    But I also want to say I appreciate the fact that Orrin Hatch has 
worked with me, particularly, to try to encourage the orderly 
confirmation of judges, when so many people would rather not deal with 
that issue. I've done my best to take that out of politics, and I think 
it's important.
    I want to thank you for several things. If I could begin, I want to 
thank you for what you do every day when you're not being politically 
active. I want to thank you for what you do day-in and day-out to give 
personal insurance service to people across this country. I want to 
thank you for the work you're doing to modernize insurance, to build a 
presence on-line and in E-commerce. And I want to ask you to continue to 
help to preserve the privacy of your clients in the face of this new 
technology.
    On Sunday I went to Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, 
Michigan, not too far from Detroit, to talk about the promise of the 
Internet age and the challenges to our privacy, including our financial 
privacy, that it presents. And I think it's very, very important that we 
maximize the possibilities of technology without giving up the American 
people's right to determine what basic information is or is not in the 
hands of people that they don't know and whom they have not approved to 
receive the information.
    I also want to congratulate you for diversifying this organization, 
by reaching out to the

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National African American Insurance Organization and by appointing the 
first woman to your board. The First Lady, particularly, thought that 
was a good idea. [Laughter]
    And I want to thank you for the quality of representation you have 
here in Washington. We have not always agreed over the last 7 years, but 
I have always been impressed by the straight talk and the honest, open 
effort that I have seen from your organization to try to work out 
difficulties, work out genuine differences. And when we have worked 
together, we have done some very good things indeed.
    We've worked together to get our economy moving again. When I became 
President, we had a $295 billion deficit. It was scheduled to be nearly 
$400 billion this year. The debt of the country had quadrupled over the 
previous 12 years, and I knew there was no easy way to get rid of it. So 
we passed an economic plan in 1993 that took us about 70 percent of the 
way there, and then we passed a bipartisan balanced budget in 1997 that 
had big majorities in both parties in both Houses supporting eliminating 
the deficit entirely.
    We've now run the first back-to-back surpluses in over 40 years, and 
this year we'll make it three in a row. The United States this year is 
going to pay off $216 billion of our national debt. That is the largest 
debt repayment in American history. This will bring the 3-year total to 
$355 billion, and it's further evidence, I believe, that the country 
ought to have a bipartisan economic strategy of paying off the debt and 
investing in our people, in education, in science and technology, and in 
opening new markets at home and abroad.
    Four years ago you put yourselves on the line for the Kennedy-
Kassebaum bill. I want to thank you for that. Your support has made a 
difference all across this country, and I am very grateful. Again, we 
had not only the Democrats, Vice President Gore, and I but substantial 
Republican support. And we reached agreement, and it made a difference 
for ordinary Americans. And I'm very grateful.
    It seems to me that this year the large question before the American 
people is, what are we going to do with these good times? What will we 
make of them? You can probably recall some time in your own life or your 
own business when you've gotten into a little bit of trouble, not 
because things were so tough but because things seemed to be going well, 
and therefore, there were no consequences to breaking your concentration 
or taking a little time to stop thinking about tomorrow.
    And I feel very strongly--and I think I can say this with some 
credibility since I'm not on the ballot, and most days I'm okay with 
it--[laughter]--but I think I can say, to me, the importance of this 
election is that America now knows that we can solve problems together. 
We know we can make real progress. When I became President, if I had 
said in my Inaugural Address in 1993, ``You know, if you will just stick 
with me folks, in 7 years we'll have 3 years of surpluses, and we'll be 
in a position to get this country out of debt for the first time since 
1835,'' you would have said, ``He seems like a nice young man, but we 
have a delusional person in the White House.'' [Laughter] If I had said, 
``The crime rate will come down 7 years in a row, and we'll cut the 
welfare rolls in half,'' you wouldn't have believed that. If I had said, 
``We'll find a way to work with the private sector to improve the 
quality of our air, water, and land and still have the longest economic 
expansion in history,'' you might not have believed that. So we know 
now, because of the success our country has had, that if we work 
together and we set common goals, we can achieve them. The level of 
skepticism or cynicism that was present in 1992, because of the 
difficulties that we've had for some years, is simply not there anymore. 
But the question now is, what are we going to do with a truly magic 
moment of prosperity?
    And I won't repeat the whole State of the Union Address here, but I 
just want to mention two issues to you. First of all, we have to keep 
the economy going. It makes so much else possible. I did a police event 
the other day here in the District of Columbia, and I complimented them 
on having the lowest murder rate in over 30 years and the lowest crime 
rate in nearly 30 years, a big decline in gun violence, and all the 
things they've done. We've helped them put several hundred police on the 
street. And on the way

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out, this police officer said, ``Well, thanks for all the nice words, 
but the economy didn't hurt.'' It's very important that we do that.
    We already have the longest economic expansion in history--by far, 
the longest without any kind of war involved, but including all the ones 
which mobilized the country for wartime. So how do we propose to keep 
this going?
    I personally believe it's very important that we continue to pay 
down this debt. Why? Because Americans finance a lot of their purchases 
through personal debt. We finance a lot of new equipment and business 
expansion through business debt. The personal savings rate in America is 
too low, and I would like to see it go up, and I would support 
initiatives in the Congress to try to help it increase. But meanwhile, 
when we pay down the national debt, it increases the overall savings 
rate of America; it keeps interest rates down; it makes money more 
available--the Government is putting money back into the economy instead 
of taking money out--and it works as an effective tax cut when you pay 
the debt down.
    The fact that we have gotten rid of the deficit and paid down the 
debt, according to the latest economic analysis I saw, saves the average 
homeowner about $2,000 a year in lower mortgage payments and interest 
rates being lower than they otherwise would, and a couple hundred 
dollars a year on car payments and a couple hundred dollars a year on 
college loan payments. And of course, the availability of capital for 
business expansion is profoundly important. So I hope in the midst of 
all this debate this year, you will try to sort through whether, when 
it's all said and done, whether the commitments made by various people 
all add up and we can continue to do that.
    Secondly, I think it's important, when we ask ourselves, how are we 
going to keep this economy going, that we continue to expand the base of 
America's customers. A nation in that sense is not much different than 
your enterprise. If you want to keep expanding, you've got to have 
somebody buying what you're selling. We have 4 percent of the world's 
population and 22 percent of the world's income. So it should be 
obvious. You don't have to be an Einstein to figure out you've got to 
have more markets all the time in that sort of environment.
    In that regard, there are two initiatives before the Congress today 
that have bipartisan support, and at least one--maybe both, but 
certainly one--that have bipartisan opposition. The first is the 
proposal to bring China into the World Trade Organization. That may not 
be something that you think is of immediate concern to insurance agents, 
but since you care so much about the economy, it's very important.
    China's going to get into the World Trade Organization whether we 
vote to give them normal trading relations every year or not. And the 
deal we negotiated with them does not give them one bit of increased 
access to our markets but gives us huge increased access to their 
markets.
    If you saw the deal, you would ask why they signed it. The reason 
they signed it is, you can't get into the World Trade Organization 
unless you're willing to trade. So they have a more closed economy; they 
sell a lot of stuff to us; our biggest trade deficit now usually is with 
them. And they have to open their markets. And we negotiated a very 
strong deal that will mean more jobs, more businesses, more investments 
for America. And from a national security point of view, it would, in my 
view, be a very, very unwise and precarious move to say that the United 
States doesn't care whether they're a part of the world community or 
not. You don't have to agree with another country on everything to say 
you prefer to trade with them than have an arms face-off with them and 
constant conflict with them.
    So it's in our national security interests, but it's necessary to 
keep our economy going. There's 1.2 billion people over there, and 
increasingly, more and more of them will be able to buy what Americans 
can sell. And as people sell more over there, they'll have more to buy 
insurance with. It's very important. [Laughter]
    The second thing that's important is that we should not forget that 
there are people and places in this country, many of them served by 
members of this organization, that have not fully participated in this 
economic recovery. And to some extent, there are local reasons for that 
that have to be dealt with

[[Page 964]]

at the State and local level. But there are things we can do here 
nationally, and there is a substantial bipartisan effort to pass some 
version of what I have called for 2 years my new markets initiative, to 
basically go to places like the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia or inner 
cities or upstate New York or the Native American reservations--to go in 
there and say, first, we're going to put in the infrastructure of 
growth.
    I was in rural North Carolina the other day, and the Governor and I 
announced that his telephone companies were going to give broadband 
access to every rural community in North Carolina, which will enable a 
lot of businesses that are otherwise physically isolated to do Internet 
transactions that otherwise would not be available to them.
    When I was on the Indian reservation, Shiprock, in northern New 
Mexico the other day, the Navajo reservation, I learned that 70 percent 
of the people there did not have telephones. I was introduced by a 13-
year-old girl who had won, a brilliant young girl who had won a computer 
in a contest. And she couldn't logon to the Internet because there 
wasn't a phone line in her home.
    We forget that a lot of our fellow citizens have not participated in 
this economy. And so we announced there that we were going to be able to 
provide basic phone service to those folks for a dollar a month, and we 
will be able to do a lot more--even though they are long way from most 
urban areas, we'll be able to do a lot more business for them because of 
E-commerce once we get them all hooked up.
    But the main thing that we have before the Congress is some way of 
giving tax incentives for people who have money to invest, to invest in 
these poor areas in America that are equal to the tax incentives we now 
give people to invest in poor areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa. 
I'm all for encouraging investment in developing countries overseas, but 
we ought to be giving the exact same dollar-impact investment incentives 
to invest in developing communities here in America. They're the nearest 
markets we've got, and we ought to do it.
    And let me say, finally, on the health care issue, I think it's 
quite important that we continue our efforts to provide health insurance 
and coverage and care to people who don't have it. We still have over 40 
million Americans without any health insurance. There are still too many 
children and too many working parents who don't have any. And more and 
more older Americans and their families are overwhelmed by the costs of 
long-term care and overwhelmed by their medical costs, especially for 
prescription drugs.
    So I hope this year that in this Congress we'll find a way to extend 
coverage to more Americans. I hope we can do a better job to make sure 
that every child who is eligible for coverage receives it. Of the some 
10 million children in America who do not have health insurance, public 
programs now in place--the Children's Health Insurance Program that's 
run by the State in all your States, and the Medicaid program, which is 
administered by them--would cover about half those kids today--today--
with programs already in place. And it is very important that we 
continue to do a better job.
    I also believe that we should pass the initiatives in Congress to 
provide a $3,000 a year tax credit for long-term care. This is something 
that I think has broad bipartisan support. More and more families are 
having to deal with this as we live longer, and it really is a high-
class problem in that sense. But it can be a very difficult and 
expensive one. And again, I think there's bipartisan support for this. I 
hope it will pass, and I ask for your support.
    And finally--I'm sure that Senator Hatch talked about this a little 
bit, because we're having a dispute about what the best way to do it 
is--but I think it's important that we add some prescription drug 
coverage to Medicare this year. And I feel very strongly that we ought 
to offer a completely voluntary program that's available to any senior 
who needs it, with the most being done, obviously, for people with the 
least money. But we're having an argument about exactly how to do it.
    I think you ought to know the facts. More than 60 percent of the 
senior citizens in America today lack access to affordable prescription 
drugs. If there were no Medicare program and we were all starting again 
tomorrow, we would never design one today that didn't have prescription 
drug coverage.

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Thirty-five years ago, when Medicare was set up, it was for people who 
had acute problems. It was basically a doctor care, a hospital care 
program. Today, more and more seniors face chronic problems. Anybody 
that lives to 65 in this country today has a life expectancy of 82, 83 
years. You know more about these tables than I do.
    And believe me, if you just take the medical breakthroughs that I 
think are likely to occur in the next 5 years--sometime in the next few 
months we'll announce the sequencing of the human genome. We've already 
identified the defective genes that cause breast cancer, Parkinson's, 
may lead to Alzheimer's and other things. Before you know it, when young 
mothers come home with their babies from the hospital, they'll have a 
genetic map which will say your child has these potential problems and 
these potential strengths, and if you do the following 10 things, you 
will cut by 90 percent the chance that your child will get the following 
conditions. I mean, it's going to be a whole different world out there. 
And you may have life expectancy go up in the 21st century even more 
than it went up in the 20th century.
    There have been a lot of studies to try to determine how long the 
human body would last if nothing bad ever happened. And the answer is, 
about 120 years. That is, if you factor out environmentally caused 
cancer, accidents, and crime leading to death, and we all had perfect 
nutrition and took good care of ourselves, our systems, most of us, 
would still stop functioning somewhere around 120 years. They've done a 
lot of tests with animals that show that no matter how well you take 
care of them, someday they just conk out. [Laughter] But that means that 
we've got quite a long way to go. I expect George Frazier to live about 
120 years. [Laughter] But the rest of us are going to need a little 
help. [Laughter]
    And so I think that will completely change the insurance business. 
You think about it. It will totally change health and life insurance if 
the average life expectancy goes up another 8 years. And it's why we 
also--I agree with one thing Orrin Hatch said--I hope we can avoid 
politicizing this whole Social Security debate. I think it ought to be 
discussed, and policy options ought to be taken care of.
    One of the things that I've been trying to convince Congress to do 
is take the interest savings off the debt, since we're paying down the 
debt because not only--we've cut spending, but you're still paying more 
in Social Security taxes than we're paying out. So I think we ought to 
take that portion of debt reduction, so we don't have to pay interest on 
the debt anymore, that's due to Social Security taxes, and put it in the 
Trust Fund.
    And then we could take the Social Security Trust Fund out to 2054, 
and then we could decide what else to do to try to increase the return, 
because when all the baby boomers retire, there will be two people 
working for only one person drawing Social Security. The ratio has 
normally been 3 or 4 to 1; it's going to go down to 2 to 1. So there are 
a lot of challenges there.
    But the point I want to make is, this whole thing is going to 
change, and the emphasis, more and more and more, will be on keeping 
people well in the first place, letting them manage their own care, 
letting people stay at home, not overwhelming the hospital system and 
the medical care system. You would never, today, set up a Medicare 
program without prescription drug coverage.
    So basically what we're having a debate about here is at what level 
to stop the coverage and how best to deliver it. And the only thing I'd 
like to say about the level, because I think that's very important, is 
that if you stop at 150 percent of the poverty line, it sounds 
reasonable, but that means that seniors over $15,000 in income can't buy 
any medical coverage. Half of the people who don't have prescription 
drug coverage today are between the incomes of $15,0000 and $50,000. And 
if you're on a fixed income of $30,000, you may think you're sitting 
pretty if you're 75 years old. But if you get a $2,000 a month medical 
bill because you've got a chronic problem, all of a sudden you don't 
have much money left. And I'm sure you all know this, so I hope we can 
find a way this year--I think there's a fair chance we can--to put this 
issue beyond partisan politics and also to get a program that works.
    I also have to tell you that a lot of people in the insurance 
industry have been very forthright in saying that they think that our 
proposal is probably more workable. But the

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reason that the prescription drug people don't like it--the 
pharmaceutical companies don't like it--is they think that it would 
cover so many people that we would have too much bargaining power, and 
we'd get the drugs too cheap. And if you listen to their argument, they 
think that that might mean that they wouldn't have enough profit margin 
to continue to develop new drugs. I don't want to paint them as the bad 
guys here; we're having a genuine argument.
    But I think that if we are to design--if we design a program that 
doesn't work, then we wind up with the worst of both worlds. And the 
insurance industry could be left holding the bag if you're expected to 
offer policies that are not practical, that won't sell, and if they do 
sell, won't do what people want. That's why we've actually had quite a 
lot of really good dialog with people in the insurance industry about 
that, and I'm very grateful for it.
    But I just want to say to you, this is a national problem that 
deserves a national solution. We should not have a program to cover 
senior citizens and disabled people's medical benefits that doesn't 
cover prescription drugs. We need to do this. This is a sort of measure 
of what we do with good times.
    There are lots of issues I could mention, including the education of 
our children, the continued work to make America a safer country. I 
don't think we should stop on this crime deal until we have the safest 
big country in the world. We've still got a lot of work to do. And there 
are so many other challenges out there. But if we could just think 
about, here, keeping the economy going, extending its benefits to people 
in places left behind, and continue to make progress on health care--
those are great goals worthy of a nation that is grateful for the 
success it has enjoyed.
    And as I leave office, that's all I really want. I don't want to 
think that we squandered this enormous opportunity. For the last 7 
years, Al Gore and I and all the people that have worked with us, we've 
tried so hard just to turn this country around and get it moving in the 
right direction. And now, as I leave at the end of the year, what I'm 
thinking of is how will we deal with the prosperity? It's a great 
measure of a great nation. And I hope you'll do what you can to make 
sure we deal with it in an appropriate way.
    Now, before I sit down, I want to ask your president to join me. 
Bill, come up here. We've got a little surprise for George Frazier. 
George is thinking about retiring after 46 years as an independent 
agent. I'm against that. I don't know, you know, you're not term-
limited, why quit? [Laughter]
    As you heard him say, I've known him all my life, since I was a 
little boy in Hope, Arkansas. And for all those years, I have known him 
as a person who always, always cared more about other people than 
himself and always gave more than he took, whether it was a Little 
League team that needed a sponsor or a hospital that needed a new wing 
or a young man starting out in public life who needed advice and 
friendship. He has been there for a lifetime.
    I want to say that he and his wife, Effie, who are here today, are 
literally two of the finest people I have ever known in my life. And as 
I said, I had the honor of swearing him in 23 years ago as the president 
of your organization. And I think it's quite fitting that I started my 
career with his presidency and ended it with my own. I'm more surprised 
about mine than his. [Laughter] And I am very grateful to him for what 
he has been professionally and even more for what he has been as a 
citizen, as a human being.
    So George, Hillary and I love you. And if you will come up here, I 
want to present to you a beautiful resolution that this organization is 
giving you for your years of dedication and service.

 [At this point, the President presented the resolution to Mr. Frazier. 
]

    The President.  Thank you very much. Thank you.

 Note:  The President spoke at 8:55 a.m. in the Independence Ballroom at 
the Grand Hyatt. In his remarks, he referred to Bill Houston, president, 
Paul A. Equale, chief executive officer, and George Frazier, former 
president, Independent Insurance Agents of America; Lib 
Carlisle, former chair, Arkansas State Democratic Party; and Myra Jodie, 
student, Steamboat Navajo Nation.

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