THE WHITE HOUSE
       
                     Office of the Press Secretary
       
                                                                    
       For Immediate Release                          February 15, 1994
       
       
                       THE FIRST LADY'S SPEECH 
            BEFORE THE AMERICAN LEGION'S ANNUAL CONFERENCE
                   AT THE SHERATON WASHINGTON HOTEL
       
       
               MRS. CLINTON:  -- officially at the Olympics, just
       over the weekend.  And I am so --
       
               (Applause.)
       
               MRS. CLINTON:  I'm so proud of our young people who
       are there competing, and it just gave me an enormous thrill,
       especially when I was able to attend the medal ceremony for
       the young man from Alaska, who won the downhill skiing
       (inaudible) --
       
               (Applause.)
       
               MRS. CLINTON:  -- the highlight of the (inaudible).
       I am so honored to be here with your Secretary for Veterans'
       Affairs and, boy, is he a good representative for all of you.
       
               (Applause.)
       
               MRS. CLINTON:  Secretary Brown brings to the
       councils of the government his experience and his
       perspective; and those of you who know him know that he is
       not shy about expressing both, and he has been a very valued
       member of the President's Cabinet.
       
               I want to thank the commander for that very kind
       introduction and all of the officers, both current and
       former, who are here with us today.  I especially want to
       thank the members of the Auxiliary who are here.  I had a
       wonderful relationship with our Auxiliary in Arkansas during
       the many years that I attended and I am very appreciative of
       all your hard work.
       
               (Applause.)
       
               MRS. CLINTON:  The work that the Legion and the
       Auxiliary do on behalf of our young people is unparalleled;
       and I don't think that we could have the quality of life that
       we have enjoyed in our country all of these years had it not
       been, in many communities, for the Legion and the Auxiliary,
       and I'm very grateful to you.
       
          I'm also particularly grateful for the fine work
       you do with respect to the blood drives every year.  You know
       that we have a shortage of blood in many regions of our
       country and, in many regions, the Legion is the number one
       organizer for blood drives, and I want to thank all of you
       for that, as well.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  It is always a privilege, as it was
       for me during this past year, to meet with representatives of
       our various veterans' organizations.  I want to echo both the
       words of the secretary and the commander in thanking the
       officers and staff of the American Legion for the countless
       hours that you gave in working with the VA and working with
       the Presidential task force on health care.
       
          I came to this task without many preconceptions,
       when my husband asked me if I would work on the whole
       challenge of reforming our health care system, but I came
       with a personal bias in favor of the VA and the veterans'
       health systems, which I think I was able to inherit.  It was
       passed on genetically, by my father to me.
       
          And I remember many times, as I have shared with
       Roger and some others in meetings over the past years, that
       one of the things my father could never understand was why,
       as a veteran, he couldn't continue to use the VA system all
       through his life.  He had to view that as a taxpayer and a
       veteran, and if he wanted to take his dollars, whether they
       were private dollars or Medicare dollars, to the VA system,
       he should have been able to be permitted to do so.
       
          So I admit, I came with a bias that my father
       planted, indeed, very early, and I intend to do everything
       that I can (inaudible) --
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  As many of you probably know, my
       father died last year and, in his series of illnesses over
       the last decade, the constant conversation we would have
       about his desire to be able to use the VA system -- and I
       think it was as much a sense of his belonging, as anything
       else.  But it was one that really made a big impression on
       me.  But it was not only what he told me over the years.  It
       was reinforced many times over, as I have traveled the
       country.
       
          One of the great privileges I have had in this past
       year is literally to go from Maine to Hawaii, from Florida to
       Washington, and to visit with thousands of Americans, both in
       person and through their letters.  I have now received a
       million letters from people.  I wish you could read even a
       fraction of them.  They are letters from all kinds of
       Americans.
       
          And I carry this movie in my head of the faces and
       the stories that I have been told, and I want to start with
       just one that seared in my brain what my father had told me
       and what many of you have shared with me over this past year
       about the need for us to strengthen and enhance our VA system
       and to make it a possible health care alternative for
       veterans.
       
          I was in New Orleans and I was visiting with a
       group of workers at a small factory there.  Most of the men I
       was talking with did hard, manual work every day.  They were
       good, steady employees.  Most of them had worked for the same
       employer for 15 years, some as many, as I recall, 28 years.
       Most of them were veterans.      They did not have any health
       care benefits through their employer.  They did not make
       enough money to be able to afford insurance on their own. 
       And the stories they told me were ones that had become all
       too familiar but they were especially poignant, being told by
       veterans.
       
          I will never forget a young man -- by my standards
       these days, anyone in his 40s is young -- a young man, a
       Vietnam veteran, a hard worker, a taxpayer, a family man, --
       but without much education so the job that he had, which was
       his source of livelihood for himself and his family probably
       paid him, after a hard week's work, less than $20,000 --
       telling me that he just prayed that his children wouldn't get
       sick, he just prayed that he wouldn't get sick, and they
       always postponed going to the doctor.  And, when he did
       finally have to go to the doctor, it was usually at the last
       possible moment and he would enter our health care system
       through the emergency room, which is all too common for those
       working Americans without insurance who number now upwards in
       the 30 millions.
       
          And he looked at me, and he wasn't asking for any
       special treatment.  He wasn't asking even for sympathy.  He
       just wanted to explain to me what his life was like.  He
       said, "You know, the proudest years of my life were when I
       served in the military, and I'm proud to be a veteran, but I
       sure don't understand why I can't get health care in the
       civilian world the way I could when I wore a uniform.  That
       really made a big impression on me, and his story could be
       told by countless others.
       
          About six months later, I was out at Andrews Air
       Force Base for their annual air show and I was shaking hands
       along a rope line.  And a man in uniform grabbed my hand and
       he said, "I want you to know something.  I'm in the Reserve. 
       I don't have any health insurance.  My family doesn't have
       any health insurance.  I'm proud to be a veteran.  I'm proud
       to be in the Reserve.  But I'm going to have to look for
       another job and move somewhere so I can get some health
       insurance for my family."  I had never even thought that we
       didn't provide some kind of support for our Reserve military
       men and women.
       
          We have a situation in our country today which, if
       we leave it untended, will deteriorate.  That situation is
       that we are spending more money than any country in the world
       by far.  I recently came from Norway.  They spend 7-1/2
       percent of their national income on health.  We spend nearly
       15 percent.
       
          They cover everybody.  They also, as you may know,
       have universal military service.  They provide a lot of their
       people benefits that we probably wouldn't want to because
       they cost a lot, but they sure do provide health care for
       everybody, at a lower cost than we pay and don't provide it
       for people like that veteran in New Orleans or that member of
       the Reserves out at Andrews.  We spend more money and really
       end up getting less for it. We are not making a good bargain
       with our health care system.
       
          Over the years, starting with Franklin Roosevelt, a
       lot of people and both Presidents of the Republican and
       Democratic parties believed that providing health security
       was a key to ensuring basic security and stability for people
       in our nation.  Franklin Roosevelt couldn't get it done,
       although he thought it would be the second chapter to Social
       Security.
       
          Harry Truman tried twice, in 1945 and 1947.  He was
       strongly committed to it and strongly committed to veterans,
       which is one of the reasons why the GI Bill, which you helped
       to sponsor and bring about with presidential leadership,
       became such a gateway to the future for literally millions of
       American veterans.  But he couldn't get health care through. 
       And he ranted and raved as only Harry Truman could.  I've
       read some of those speeches.  They're a lot better than what
       we're hearing today and they really --
       
          (Laughter.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  -- they just called it for what it
       was and didn't let anybody worry about it.  But he couldn't
       get it done.
       
          We finally took care of our elderly citizens
       through Medicare in the 1960s and our very poorest with
       Medicaid in the 1960s, but there are a lot of misconceptions
       about those programs, too.  We do provide basic health care
       for senior citizens over 65 but we don't provide prescription
       drug benefits, which is the fastest-growing cost for many of
       our older Americans.  And, although we do provide health care
       through Medicaid for the poorest of the poor, we put working
       Americans like that man in New Orleans into the unusual and,
       I think, unacceptable position of working and paying taxes to
       pay for medical care for people on Welfare that he cannot get
       himself.
       
          So we've got a funny kind of situation in our
       country when it comes to health care.  Some have said, "Well,
       we don't have a health care crisis."  Well, I would disagree
       with that.  It is a crisis if you don't have any doctor you
       can get to besides an emergency room.
          
          It is a crisis if you want to get off Welfare but
       if you take a minimum wage job, which is all you're qualified
       for, you don't get medical benefits, so you have to make the
       decision to stay on Welfare and get your children medical
       benefits or to get off Welfare and go to work, which is what
       we want you to do, and not, and not get medical benefits.
       
          It is a crisis if you're an older American with a
       relative, a spouse, who needs long-term care and the only
       option available to you is the nursing home, when you would
       rather keep that relative at home and take care of him
       yourself.
       
          We have the finest doctors and hospitals in the
       world.  We can beat any country when it comes to the quality
       of health care we have for those of us who are able to use it
       on a regular basis.  But we do have probably the stupidest
       financing system in the world for health care.  We spend --
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  We spend money on paperwork, we
       spend money on bureaucracy, that we shouldn't have to spend. 
       And what the President's plan is designed to do is to
       simplify our system to get it to the point where we can put
       doctors back in charge of the system again, where they can be
       making the decisions, not insurance company executives or
       government bureaucrats which is the way it is too often
       today.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  The President's goal is this:  to
       guarantee private insurance to every American.  Now, you're
       going to hear a lot, as you already have, about how the
       government is going to take over health care.  That is not
       the President's plan at all.  That is what other countries
       have done.
       
          Other countries have taken over health care and
       basically had it government-run.  What we want to do is to
       provide private insurance for everyone and have a mix of
       systems the way we do now.  The VA is a public system.  It
       will remain an independent, publicly-funded system, open, we
       hope, to more veterans than it ever has been before.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Every one of your communities has
       public health facilities.  They have public hospitals.  Some
       of you have counties that run hospitals in your area.  You
       have not-for-profits, like the Catholic Hospital Association,
       which runs many hospitals around our country and you have
       for-profit hospitals.  We have a mix.  We want to maintain
       and improve that mix.
       
          In order to do that, we have to make sure every
       American has access to that system.  So you will hear words
       thrown around like "access" and "coverage" and let me make
       sure that we understand the difference.
       
          As a friend of mine said the other day, everybody
       in America has access to a Cadillac, but you may not be able
       to afford it.   We have access to health care right now if
       you can afford it.  What we don't have is the guarantee that
       every American is covered to be able to afford health care.
       
          So listen carefully when this debate picks up over
       the next months.  Some will talk about universal access. 
       Some will talk about universal coverage.  We want coverage. 
       I want to go back to New Orleans and that factory and be able
       to look into the eyes of those men who are working and paying
       taxes and tell them, "You will now have coverage because you
       will be able to afford private, guaranteed insurance."
       
          Now, in addition to that, we have to change the
       insurance market and the way it operates.  I don't know how
       many of you have ever read the fine print in your insurance
       policies.  I haven't.  I don't think most of us do until
       maybe it's too late.  But 75 percent of policies have
       something called lifetime limits.  What that means is, if you
       get really sick and you spend whatever that limit is -- and
       some policies have limits as low as $50,000; others have $1
       million -- but once you hit that limit, you are not insurable
       anymore unless you pay a huge, huge increase in your
       premiums.
       
          I have talked to families.  I remember so well the
       family that had two healthy children and a third child born
       and I think to myself, "There but for the grace of God go
       many of us."  This little baby was born very ill.  Within six
       months, the $1 million lifetime limit was used up.  And
       here's a family with a father that makes a very good living
       and he cannot afford to buy insurance to take care of that
       baby.  So by the time I met this family, that baby had been
       in the intensive care nursery for 15 months.
       
          The baby had been put onto the Welfare Medicaid
       program so the hospital could get some money.  The father
       couldn't find anybody to insure them to be able to bring the
       baby home, which is what the family wanted to do, but they
       needed help to be able to pay for round-the-clock nursing and
       equipment.  So here's a family which, by any standards, would
       be a very well-off family, totally destroyed by something
       called lifetime limits.  Under the President's plan, there
       will be no lifetime limits on insurance policies (inaudible)
       --
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Second, many of you know that, under
       the current insurance market, if you have something called a
       pre-existing condition, you pay more or, you may not be
       insurable at all.  There are only 81 million Americans who
       fall into that category.  There are a lot of us with pre-
       existing conditions.
       
          The scary thing to me is that I had a scientist
       tell me the other day that in the future, we're learning so
       much about the human gene system and what genes cause various
       diseases that, by the turn of the century, every one of is
       going to have a pre-existing condition.  If we don't hurry up
       and get this health care system reformed, none of us will be
       able to afford insurance at the rate we're going.
       
          Under the President's plan, everybody gets
       insurance and you do not get charged more because you have a
       pre-existing condition, and that's the way insurance should
       operate for Americans.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  And then, finally, most insurance
       companies charge older people more than they charge younger
       people.  Looking around this room, all of us are in that
       category.  We're going to be charged more than 20-year-olds
       who think they're immortal and don't think they need
       insurance, anyway.  But you know what?  Those 20-year-olds
       have a funny way of turning out to be 40 and 60-year-olds,
       too, don't they?
       
          We have this old-fashioned idea that the young and
       the old ought to be in the same insurance pool together, so
       we do not want to permit insurance companies to charge people
       in their 50s more than they charge people in their 20s.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  We ought to have insurance go back
       to mean what it used to mean for all Americans across the
       board.
       
          Now, how will we get insurance under the
       President's plan?  The same way most Americans get it 
       today -- at the workplace.  That is where we get our
       insurance.  That, in fact, grew up during the Second World
       War as the favorite means of insuring workers.  What that
       means is that employers and employees will make a
       contribution to health care.
       
          There are only three ways to achieve universal
       coverage.  You can do what countries like Canada does and
       basically have a big tax that eliminates all the private
       sector investment and has the government run the health care
       system.  We rejected that.
       
          You can try to do it through an individual mandate
       which says, "Everybody in this audience, you're on your own. 
       You've go out in the insurance market and you buy health care
       insurance, just like you do with auto insurance."  The only
       problem is, a lot of people never get around to getting their
       auto insurance.  Even when they have to go to get that
       license, somehow they evade responsibility, don't they?
          
          It's very hard to determine which individuals are
       actually paying what they should pay to be insured and the
       other problem is, employers who already help insure employees
       would drop a lot of their employees because, if they didn't
       have to contribute, many of them would not.
       
          What we think is the better way to do is to take
       what works in the American system, build on that, and provide
       discounts to small businesses and discounts to low-wage
       workers and, if you change the insurance market the way I've
       just described, the cost will go down for everybody.
       
          The most discriminated part of the insurance market
       today is the part that is small business.  Any of you who are
       small business owners, you know what it's like to try to buy  
       health insurance on your own.  You don't get the same
       bargains as the big employers get.  You have to pay 35 to 40
       percent more.  We will eliminate that and the costs for small
       business will be dramatically reduced.
       
          Once everybody is in the insurance system, they
       will be given a health security card and they will be
       entitled to certain comprehensive benefits with a special
       emphasis on preventive health care.  We have done this all
       backwards for so long.  We will pay for the surgery but we
       won't pay for the test that could determine early if you had
       the disease so we could try to stop it from advancing to the
       point of surgery.
       
          For years, insurance companies wouldn't pay for
       women for a mammogram but they would pay for breast surgery
       if the woman developed cancer.  We don't have insurance
       companies that pay for well-child care or immunizations but
       they'll pay if the child gets measles or some other kind of
       disease that puts him into the hospital.  Now, where I come
       from, that is a very bad way to run a business.
       
          We ought to be paying for prevention.  We ought to
       be taking care of people when they are at least able to be
       cured instead of when we have to do the most extreme and
       expensive kind of surgery or chemotherapy on them at the very
       end of the process.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Comprehensive benefits will also
       include home health care and hospice care and rehabilitation
       which are especially important for veterans and for older
       Americans.  I am so tired of women particularly -- some men
       but mostly women -- whose husbands are struck down in their
       60s or 70s with Alzheimer's or a stroke or some other kind of
       debilitating disease and these women want to take care of
       their husbands and they are given no help and no support to
       do so.  And what they are told is, if they spend themselves
       into poverty, then there will be a nursing home waiting for
       their husband.
       
          They don't want their husband in a nursing home. 
       They want him at home.  We want parents and spouses and
       children to be able to take care of family members at home
       until it is absolutely impossible, and the President's plan
       begins to provide that opportunity.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  The benefits also include mental
       health benefits and treatment for substance abuse.  Now, this
       is controversial.  Many people say, "Well, you know, we
       should not include that."  But, you know, mental health is a
       huge cost to our nation.  You see the homeless people talking
       to themselves on the street corners, sleeping on the grates
       in 20-degree weather, many of whom are veterans.  You see our
       prisons, filled with offenders who are there because of drugs
       or alcohol or some mental illness.
       
          This is not just a health care issue.  It is an
       issue that runs across our entire society.  And for any
       member of a family in this audience who is suddenly struck by
       a young person in their late teens or 20s developing
       schizophrenia or watched a family member undergo the pain of
       clinical depression, you know that those are as serious and
       disruptive illnesses as diabetes or cancer or any other. We
       need to begin to provide benefits, and it will save us money
       if we do it in a cost-effective way.
       
          So those kinds of comprehensive benefits being
       available to all will be especially important for older
       Americans because we will add coverage for long-term care and
       prescription drugs to Medicare.  For less than $10 a month,
       Medicare recipients will have their prescription drug
       benefits paid for.
       
          I am so hopeful that we can get that passed
       because, you know, for many older Americans, the choice every
       months comes to, "Do I buy more food or do I pay for my
       prescription drugs?"  And I've talked to pharmacists all over
       this country who tell me, whether they work in a hospital or
       in their retail pharmacies, that they know that their older
       patients come in clutching those prescriptions, and it says,
       "Take four a day for two weeks," and their older customers
       say, "What if I only take one a day?  Will that last longer,
       will that work?"  And, of course, it doesn't work.
       
          So then, so often, that person ends up back in the
       hospital, which Medicare will pay for, but they won't pay for
       the medication to keep you out of the hospital.  So we need
       to have prescription drugs.
       
          Let me say a few words about what exactly we intend
       to do with the VA system, because I'm so excited about what
       we have worked to create in this health bill with the help of
       the Legion and other veteran organizations and with the VA. 
       
          Today you know better than most citizens that the
       VA system has to overcome numerous statutory and financial
       obstacles.  That is just to be able to maintain its service
       to our veterans.  The current VA system must contend with
       funding resources entirely from federal appropriations and,
       in today's tighter and tighter budgets.
       
          Although in this budget that this President has
       presented, the appropriation for VA goes up, that isn't true
       for most other departments and, with the kinds of pressure
       for deficit reduction and the absence of strong support for
       those federal appropriations for the VA, I'm afraid we will
       see cuts, unless we have real health care reform that
       includes strong provisions for the protection of the federal
       appropriations and other sources of income for VA, and that
       means removing the prohibitions on the VA receiving Medicare
       or insurance.  You also are confronted with confusing and
       complex eligibility rules that confuse both veterans and
       their caregivers and other problem that we have looked at. 
       
          The President's Health Security Act embraces the VA
       system as a key component of national health care and we
       expect it will provide high-quality, affordable health care,
       and we're going to give you some advantages to be competitive
       that we have never been able to provide before.
       
          The first is that, under the Health Security Act,
       the VA will become a potential provider for health care
       services for millions of Americans who are veterans without
       regard to the old eligibility (inaudible).  We will always --
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  We will always give first preference
       to service-connected disabilities and to our poorest of our
       veterans.  But there is no reason why many of you in this
       audience should not be able to choose the VA system if that
       is your choice and, under the President's plan, you will make
       the choice. 
       
          You know these television advertisements that they
       spent about $20 million on saying that we're going to take
       away your choice?  Well, that's just flat untrue.  In fact,
       we're going to give you more choice because the choice is not
       going to be your employer's and the choice is not going to be
       the government's.  The choice is going to be yours to make.
       
          The only choice we're trying to take away is those
       insurance companies' that are funding that ad, so that they
       can no longer choose to disqualify you from health care
       because they want to do so, or charge you more than they
       would have otherwise.  We do want to take that choice away.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  So under the Health Security Act,
       the VA remains an independent system.  All veterans can
       choose the VA plan and its special expertise on health issues
       related to military service.  Veterans with service-connected
       disabilities and low-income veterans who choose VA as their
       health plan will receive comprehensive hospital and out-
       patient care with no copayments or deductibles.  All veterans
       become eligible for the comprehensive package of national
       health care benefits that includes access to comprehensive
       out-patient health care.
       
          The Health Security Act provides for a $3 billion
       investment fund for medical care to improve the VA's medical
       delivery system and to make it more competitive.  Service-
       disabled and low-income veterans remain eligible for free VA
       benefits, such as long-term care.  The unnecessary reporting
       requirements and inspections that currently burden VA
       institutions and providers will be reduced freeing VA
       providers to concentrate on patients instead of paperwork. 
       The VA --
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  The VA will be permitted to retain
       funds that are recovered from both private insurance
       companies and Medicare and, we believe, with more funds
       coming in, the VA will be able to offer even better care to
       more veterans.  We want VA managers to be allowed to control
       their budgets on-site so that we can delegate more
       flexibility.
       
          You know, a VA hospital in Montana may have a
       different need to meet in their patient community than a VA
       hospital in Florida and you cannot run that from the top
       down.  We've got to give the VA managers in the local
       veterans' communities some flexibility and say in how their
       local VA hospitals take care of their patients.  That will
       help improve health care across the board.
       
          This entire VA system, if you look at it, has some
       of the highest-tech, most extraordinary medical care going
       on.  I've been out to the Washington center.  I have seen
       things that I haven't seen in the most advanced private
       hospitals.  I have seen how they have begun to use technology
       so that the VA hospital in Washington and the VA hospital in
       Baltimore can communicate by satellite about a single patient
       who lives in between and may go to both.
       
          We have some of the finest-quality physicians and
       health care in the VA system but they have been held down and
       they have not been given the support they need to really do
       the job they are capable of doing, and we need to give them
       that kind of help.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  There will no longer be any means
       testing.  If you choose the VA benefits package, you will be
       eligible for the VA benefit package.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  And so what we are trying to do is
       to create in the VA system what you would want from the best-
       quality health care system in America.  We want the VA system
       to compete for every one of the veterans' dollars that will
       come to it.  Now, that doesn't mean you have to.  You can
       still choose a different health plan.  But what we've talked
       about with the VA is for them to begin to partner with other
       facilities in their regional areas.
       
          A VA hospital in conjunction with a children's
       hospital, a women's hospital, a community hospital, is going
       to be a very powerful provider so that you can sign up for a
       health plan where your wives will be taken care of, your
       children will be taken care of, and you will be able to use
       your benefits at the VA hospital.  That's the kind of
       creative use of both our federal and our private dollars that
       we want to see done.
       
          And finally, the VA will continue to provide
       Chapter 17 benefits beyond the comprehensive benefits package
       to all veterans who are currently eligible to receive them. 
       This is something we believe in very strongly in the Clinton
       Administration.  We feel that we owe all of you a great debt
       for what you have done for our country in fighting external
       threats.
       
          We honestly see our health care system and the
       financial drain that it is placing on families and businesses
       and governments as an internal threat but one we are fully up
       to meeting.  We do have to make some changes but we need to
       make changes that make common sense and build on what we
       think will work.
       
          The Legion has been a champion on behalf of
       veterans for many decades.  Many of these changes that we are
       incorporating come from that gold book and come from the
       kinds of proposals that you have made for years, that fell on
       deaf ears.  Nobody wanted to deal with the health care
       system.
       
          You know, Richard Nixon proposed a health care
       reform plan very similar to what my husband is proposing,
       building on the employer-based system.  So both Democratic
       and Republican Presidents have tried to get beyond politics
       on this one.
       
          But you know and I know that we're going to have to
       really convince the people on the Hill that not only do all
       Americans deserve secure health care, because none of has it
       -- even those of us with the best insurance in the world, we
       don't know that we'll have the same insurance at the same
       price this time next year -- so none of us can be sure in our
       system.  And even those eligible for Medicaid, with the
       pressures on cutting the budget, you can't be sure you'll
       have the same benefits at the same cost this time next year.
       
          So we have a considerable challenge ahead of us
       but, just as you have met challenges in the past, help us
       meet this one.  Listen carefully to this debate.  Ask hard
       questions.  Find out what will really happen to you and your
       loved ones and your fellow veterans because the only plan
       that has tried, in a comprehensive way, to deal with every
       American's needs is the President's plan, and we have
       welcomed your help in creating it and we would welcome your
       help in trying to bring it to reality because I want to see
       every American, but particularly our veterans, get the health
       care they deserve to have.
       
          Thank you very much.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          Q  Ladies and gentlemen, the First Lady of the
       United States.  And we appreciate your comments and
       information about the health care reform package that's going
       through Congress today.
       
          (Applause.)
       
          Q  (Inaudible).  We just need everyone to make sure
       you stay in place.
       
          (End of tape.)