NEAL CONAN, Host: This is "Morning Edition". I'm Neal Conan. President Clinton
brought his health care reform legislation to Congress on Wednesday. By
yesterday, Congressional committees were already discussing changes. This is
just the beginning of what promises to be a long political debate on the
nation's health care problems. Hillary Rodham Clinton was chair of the White
House task force on health care reform. We talked to her yesterday in Baltimore
after she and President Clinton spoke to medical students at Johns Hopkins
University. Mrs. Clinton said that while the president is willing to accept
changes in the administration's health care plan, there is a limit.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, First Lady: He will not support and will not sign a
bill that does not guarantee universal coverage and comprehensive benefits to
every American. That is the only way every American will have real health
security.
CONAN: One of the central and controversial elements of the proposal is
mandating that employers pay for the health care. Would you support a bill that
eliminated that?
MRS. CLINTON: Well only if it were an alternative that fairly financed
universal health care coverage with comprehensive benefits. There are really
only three ways we can think of to get to universal coverage with comprehensive
benefits for every American. One is to raise a broad-based, large tax at the
federal level so that we become a single-payer system and enable the government
to basically funnel all funds from private individuals through the tax system
to health care providers. The other alternative, which is proposed by the
Republicans in the Senate, led by Senator Chafee, is to mandate individuals to
buy health insurance, much as states try now to mandate individuals to buy auto
insurance. For a variety of reasons, the president rejected both of those
approaches, and instead decided to build on the way 90 percent of those of us
who are insured get our insurance, which is through the employer-employee
relationship. Now, if someone could convince a majority of the Congress that an
individual mandate could be fairly implemented and could be used without
encouraging employers who currently insure to eliminate health care coverage so
that we would have more and more people having to go into the market on their
own to buy health insurance, or if for some reason I cannot imagine, a majority
of the Congress decided they wanted to raise $400- or $500 billion in new taxes
to replace the private investment that is in our health care system, if it met
the president's test he would look at it. But I don't think either of those,
once the American people really study them carefully, will be seen as an
adequate alternative to what works now, which is to build on the
employer-employee system. But if somebody has a good way of trying to come up
with it that we haven't thought of, we're open to that.
CONAN: `Comprehensive' is a debatable term, I guess. Already some
liberals say that the new caps on federal spending to cover poor people,
lethally compromise your plan. How are you going to hold onto people who say
that what you have now isn't enough, and also win the votes of those who say,
you know `What you have now is already too much. We can't afford it.'?

 MRS. CLINTON: Well, I think we are exactly where the president wants to be
which is in the reasonable middle of this debate. You can never satisfy those
who, on the one hand, out of every good motivation believe that we can afford
to do much more than what the president is proposing; and we can't satisfy
those who, both out of good and bad motivation, don't want to fix our health
care system because they think that individuals should be out there on their
own and that's just the price we pay, I guess. I think where the president is
is the right position. There is more than enough money in this health care
system to provide comprehensive benefits to every American with the addition of
the contributions that will come from those who are currently not paying, plus
a tax on tobacco, plus an assessment on corporations that wish to remain
self-insured- by reallocating the money that is in the system. But if anything
totally unpredictable should ever occur in the future, we would do what you
always do in America. You go back and you fix the legislation. We've had to
make adjustments in social security over the years in order to make sure that
it fulfilled its original promise, but the basic system was in place. Well,
what we're looking to is putting in place a basic health security system. We
think it is adequately funded and we think, more importantly, it will satisfy
the basic needs that Americans have.
CONAN: Are you concerned, and I'm sure you've seen the same polls everybody's
seen over the last couple of days, which suggest that support for the plan has
gone down in the month or so since the president's speech to the joint session
of Congress, and your appearances on Capitol Hill?
MRS. CLINTON: No, not at all. I mean, I think this is a long-term effort. I
don't even look at those polls. I pay really no attention to them. Every false
impression or fear that has been thrown out there - and my gosh there's been
millions of dollars already spent to advertise about a piece of legislation
that's only been available for a day - the more people know that many of these
attacks are self-serving. They are coming from quarters that want to sustain
the status quo. And so I think we're going to be able to answer that kind of
barrage of charges and to work with people who have what I consider good faith
questions.
CONAN: You're not afraid you've lost momentum?
MRS. CLINTON: No, no. I mean, if you've been around as long as I have and as
long as you have, Neal, you see these things up and down. I don't evaluate what
is a historic debate on the basis of any poll or on any daily headline. You
know, go back and look at Franklin Roosevelt and social security. He had to
fight through an election at mid-term before he was able finally to produce a
social security act, and yes, there will be many battles ahead and many people
attempting to marginalize this issue and really undercut the very real human
need that is out there, but I think the majority of people are no longer
debating whether we should reform our health care system, they're debating how
we should do it best, and that's what I want the debate to be about.
CONAN: We know the great role that you've played so far. What's your role now?

 MRS. CLINTON: Well, I hope I will have an opportunity to continue to talk about
health care and to advocate for the changes in the president's plan. There are
all kinds of people. I mean, I think there are some who may be even listening
to us who think, `Well, you know, the insured- well they must be those people
who don't work,' you know? Or, `They must be some people who somehow don't
deserve medical care,' and you know the truth is that they're people just like
you and me, and maybe they're people who have
a pre-existing condition and they can't get insured for it. Maybe they're
people who left a job with an insurance policy to go to work because they
thought it was a better opportunity and couldn't get insured. I had a letter
from a friend of mine who has four grown children now, all in their 20's, and
she wrote and she said, `You know, when you started this I didn't really know
what you were talking about because we've always had good health insurance in
our family and my husband could always provide for us. Now all of a sudden I
have these four children and one of them is getting married and she and her
fiancee bought a little house. They were fixing it up. He fell out of a tree.
They had no insurance. Another of our children is married. Her husband moved to
a new job and in the couple of months it took before he qualified for his new
employer's insurance policy, his wife got pregnant, so no help for the
pregnancy. Another one of our children discovered she had a health problem and
she had just gone to work, first job out of college, no longer covered by our
policy. No health insurance.' So this friend of mine, this you know, upper
middle class, well educated family who'd always taken care of their health
bills, never really probably paid any attention to the problem of the uninsured
suddenly find their children among the uninsured. I think that is what is
happening to more of us every day, who have always enjoyed good health care,
never had to worry about insurance, but who now recognize, none of us is secure
in this country. That's what we have to end.
CONAN: Thank you very much.
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you.
CONAN: Hillary Rodham Clinton was chair of the White House task force on health
care reform.
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CONAN: It's coming up on 19 minutes after the hour.
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