THE WHITE HOUSE
       
                     Office of the Press Secretary
       
       
                                                                    
       For Immediate Release                             March 14, 1994
       
       
                       REMARKS OF THE FIRST LADY
       AT HEALTH CARE FORUM SPONSORED BY CONGRESSWOMAN SCHROEDER
                           DENVER, COLORADO
       
       
          Thank you very much.  Thank you, all.  Thank you so
       much.  It is such a pleasure to be here and see all of you,
       and to know that you are as concerned about health care as we
       are.
       
          And I want to thank Orville, again, for the
       institute support of forums like this all over the country. 
       I've had the privilege to appear on many platforms that were
       sponsored by the institute, and it's been a very good
       educational experience, and I'm very grateful.
       
          I'm also really pleased to be here with your
       governor, who has given real leadership to not only the State
       of Colorado, but the entire country, and certainly the
       governors of the United States.  He's been a thoughtful,
       stalwart friend of my husband's as they have worked through a
       lot of the problems that this country faces, and we're just
       really proud of you and grateful for your continuing support
       on health care.  (Applause.)
       
          And what does anyone say about Pat?  There is
       nobody like her, and we are so glad to have her in
       Washington, bringing a dose of fresh air all the time.  I
       have to confess, however, that I only wish I had her wit and
       her one-liners.  I'd be in a lot more trouble, but I'd have a
       lot more fun if I did, you know.  So this is a real
       privilege, and I'm so grateful that you put this together.
       
          Somebody asked me as I came in what this pin was,
       and it looked awfully big on the screen as I look at it.  I
       was in Boulder, as some of you may know, at the university,
       and a woman gave this me, and it is a depiction of Chelsea
       and Socks, so I just had to wear it.  And I hope it's not too
       distracting for all of you.
       
          I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about where
       we are with health care reform and what the President's
       approach really is, and maybe clear the air a little bit, try
       to get back to a factual discussion about what we are trying
       to do together, and then have time to answer some questions. 
       Because what I have found in forums all over the country is
       that once we actually begin to talk, and cut through a lot of
       the rhetoric and a lot of the smoke that fills the air about
       health care reform, we have so much more in common.
       
          Those of us who have worked on this issue and
       worried about it, those of you in the audience who are
       doctors and nurses, and hospital administrators and business
       leaders, and political decision makers, and parents, all of
       you have the same concern.  And what we are trying to do is
       to give some real structure to your concerns and put them in
       the context of the principles underlying the President's
       approach.
       
          Because what we have found over the last several
       months is that although people are rightly cautious about
       change, are concerned about what it will mean to them and
       their family, their business, their profession, there is
       overwhelming public support for reform.  And there is
       overwhelming public support for the principles, or, as you
       heard Dr. Rheinhart (phonetic) saying this morning, the
       ethics of the approach that the President has presented.
       
          So what I hope to do today is to continue the
       conversation I started a year ago -- more than a year, now --
       in talking about where we are, where we are heading with
       respect to these activities in congress, and what this will
       mean to you in your lives when reform is in place.  Let me
       start by saying that I think the case has been made far more
       eloquently than I by your previous speakers and by much of
       the publicity surrounding health care over the past year,
       about what is wrong with our system and why we need to make
       changes.
       
          In fact, I have now concluded that in many people's
       minds, although they fear change, they recognize that the
       status quo is probably the least attractive alternative,
       because it is a status quo that is not stable.  It is
       deteriorating.
       
          We have had in the past year an increase in the
       uninsured.  We have had in the past year an increase in
       premium rates for small businesses and families.  We have had
       in the past year increasing pressure on our public programs,
       like Medicare and Medicaid.  We see some signs of hope in
       some sectors of the health care industry, particularly when
       it comes to very large companies and state and federal
       government being able to control their costs.
       
          But we have not seen the kind of stability that
       would lead us to believe that on its own, left unaddressed,
       our system can fix the problems that are undermining the
       quality of services, access to services, and leading to
       increased insecurity among all of us, including those of us
       with insurance.  So if you look at that status quo, and you
       see what we see who try to follow all these pieces of
       evidence that we keep accumulating, then the real issue is
       not whether we reform, but how we reform.  And poll after
       poll supports the American public's awareness that this is
       the right discussion.
       
          Thank goodness we have gotten beyond the rather
       false argument about is there or isn't there a crisis.  The
       folks who tried to peddle that have backed off, and they now
       recognize, along with the rest of us, that there is a crisis. 
       It may not have entered into everyone's life, but it is a
       potential crisis for all of us, because we all live with the
       kind of insecurity that comes when you do not guarantee
       insurance to every citizen.
       
          The President's approach is built on five basic
       ideas.  The first is guaranteed private insurance for every
       American.  Now this is an important point to stress because
       some of the critics of the President's approach have said,
       well, you know, he favors government medicine.  Well, in
       fact, that is just not true.  He favors the kind of system we
       have now, but to make it work for everybody.
       
          We now have a public and private system.  Those of
       us who are privately insured achieve our health coverage by
       either our own funds or in cooperation with our employers. 
       And we have public systems like Medicare and Medicaid to take
       care of those who cannot afford insurance.  And then of
       course we have the nearly 40 million who fall between the
       cracks.
       
          What the President wants is guaranteed private
       insurance with comprehensive benefits for every American. 
       And the benefits in the President's approach have been
       spelled out.
       
          Alternative approaches have said, well, let's pass
       reform, and then we'll tell you what the benefits are later. 
       I don't know anyone who would buy an insurance policy and not
       know what was going to be covered.  So from the President's
       perspective -- we want to know from the very beginning, what
       are the benefits, in terms of hospitalization and outpatient
       care, mental health coverage, and very importantly,
       preventive and primary care.
       
          One of the points that is really significant in the
       President's approach to benefits is to try to move us more
       toward a system of individual responsibility and wellness, so
       that we no longer just take care of people when they're sick. 
       We actually try to insure them in a way that they can get
       help trying to prevent themselves from being sick or getting
       sicker.  So comprehensive benefits stressing preventive
       health care is a key.
       
          The second point that the President has stressed
       is, we need to eliminate the insurance practices in the
       marketplace today that do drive up the cost for some people,
       and discriminate against individuals and groups of
       individuals.  And there are several of those.
       
          One is the whole idea of preexisting condition.  If
       you have some kind of an illness or other sort of medical
       condition, you may find yourself ineligible for insurance, or
       find insurance priced so high you cannot afford it.  We want
       to eliminate preexisting conditions.  Everybody should be
       insurable.  Nobody should be eliminated from insurance
       because they have been sick at one time.
       
          And this is especially important in today's world,
       because -- I recently was at the National Institutes of
       Health, where they are doing fantastic research about the
       human gene system.  We are learning every month something
       more about our human genetic makeup.
       
          We are on the brink -- within the next 10 years --
       of discovering genes that cause all kinds of diseases.  We
       all will be uninsurable because we will all have some genetic
       condition that will make us ineligible.  So if for no other
       reason, we need to act now.  (Applause.)
       
          Another thing we have to eliminate from the current
       way insurance is sold and marketed is something called
       lifetime limits.  You read the fine print of your insurance
       policy.  Most of you will see that you have a lifetime limit. 
       It may be, surprisingly, as low as $50,000, or as high as $1
       million, but what it means is that if you get really sick and
       need your insurance coverage the most, if you build those
       expenses up you may get to the point, as many people have who
       have talked with me, where their insurance company says,
       we're not paying any more.  We are going to eliminate, in
       this approach, lifetime limits.
       
          And the final practice that we want to eliminate is
       discriminating against people on age.  That is something that
       I care more about every year that goes by.  I am very
       conscious of how, as I get older, my costs increase.
       
          I have this old fashioned idea that we all ought to
       be in this together, the old and the young, the sick and the
       well, supporting each other, because every one of us will
       someday be sick, and sure enough, we will all be old.  So if
       we eliminate that now, put everybody into the same insurance
       market, the whole country, we will then all pay less to
       actually guarantee more insurance for the entire population.
       
          The third point, which is critical to the
       President's approach, is guaranteeing choice of doctor and
       health plan.  Now there was a lot of concern about this
       several months ago, and there were some ads run and some
       other charges made that the President was going to make it
       impossible under his approach for you to be able to pick your
       physician.
       
          Well, first of all, what is happening today, is
       that more and more Americans are being deprived of choice. 
       How many of you in this hall today get your insurance, as
       most of us do, through the work place, and have been told
       sometime in the last several years that your employer has
       picked a different plan?
       
          You can only go to these certain listed doctors and
       these certain listed hospitals.  And you cannot, maybe, use
       the children's hospital or the academic hospital associated
       with the university, because they're too expensive.  This
       happens all over the country, every single week, because
       employers and insurance companies are trying to squeeze their
       costs down in a system that is letting costs run out of
       control.  So one of the ways they're trying to do it is by
       eliminating your choice.
       
          And we are going to reverse that, because if
       everybody is in the system then there isn't any place to
       shift costs to.  Everybody is part of the same insurance
       marketplace, and therefore we will require all health plans
       to be available, in a region, to every one of you, and it
       will not be your employer's choice or the insurance company's
       choice, it will be your choice.
       
          And every year you will choose the health plan with
       the doctors that you prefer, and every health plan, whether
       it's an HMO or a PPO, or a traditional fee-for-service health
       plan, will also have to provide a -- what's called a point-
       of-service option.  That means that if you have some
       condition, and the best person in the country is somewhere
       else, you will have the right to go there.
       
          So in fact, under the President's approach we will
       reverse the decline of choice, and guarantee it to you.  So
       we want to make that point very explicitly.  (Applause.)
       
          The fourth point I want to make is that the
       President's approach preserves Medicare.  You know, there are
       a lot of people in our country who are concerned about
       Medicare, and those of us who have older family members who
       are eligible about Medicare are also concerned.  But the two
       big problems with Medicare right now is that Medicare does
       not cover prescription drugs, and Medicare does not give
       options to older Americans when they need long-term care
       other than the nursing home.
       
          Under the President's approach, prescription drugs
       will be available to the Medicare-eligible population, which
       will be a huge cost saver for millions of older Americans.  I
       have met people in their 60s and 70s, and 80s, who pay
       anywhere from 4-5,000 to $18,000 a year for their
       prescription drugs, people living on fixed incomes.
       
          And what we want to do is to make prescription
       drugs affordable, because we don't want older Americans
       choosing between food and prescriptions, which happens right
       here in Colorado, like it does everywhere else in the
       country.  And because we know if older Americans get their
       prescriptions filled, and they're under the supervision of a
       physician who can monitor those prescriptions, they are less
       likely to need hospitalization.
       
          So prescription drugs under Medicare -- and to
       begin to provide some long-term care.  We want to preserve
       Medicare and to use money in Medicare for the people it was
       intended for, older Americans.
       
          The fifth point I want to make -- the fifth point
       has to do with how we finance health care and where we
       actually will get our guaranteed private insurance.  If you
       believe, as the governor said, that everyone should have
       health coverage in America -- and I believe that.  I hope
       that we're beyond that debate.
       
          Any reform that does not include universal
       guaranteed health care for every American will be vetoed by
       this President, because if we don't have guaranteed health
       coverage for everybody, we have not reformed our health care
       system.  (Applause.)  Now once you believe that, there are
       only three ways to do this.  There's not a million different
       ways, there's only three ways.
       
          One is to take the approach that a lot of people
       have looked at, which is to eliminate private insurance
       coverage and instead substitute for it a tax that would be
       dedicated to providing health insurance.  That is sometimes
       called a single-payer system.  That is, as a matter of fact,
       something that has a lot of support by people who know that
       it would once and for all cover everybody.
       
          And for those of you who support that, it is a goal
       that the President shares.  But he believes that we will be
       better off if we maintain our public-private mix, so that we
       can retain some competition and collaboration, and some
       accountability, so that we can keep both parts of the system,
       public and private, kind of moving along, doing their best,
       because there are alternatives out there.  So he does not
       believe we ought to raise taxes and substitute tax money for
       all of health insurance.
       
          The second way to make sure everybody is covered is
       by having what some argue for, called an individual mandate. 
       That would mean much as we do auto insurance in some states. 
       Every individual would be told they have to go out into the
       market place and buy their own insurance.  Now, the good part
       of that approach is, it recognizes you have to have either a
       tax or some requirement, some responsibility to get everybody
       covered.  The President rejected that approach because, from
       his perspective, it would do two things that he does not
       think are good.
       
          First, it would send a message to employers who are
       currently providing insurance they did not need to do that
       anymore.  I mean, if the individual is required, then why
       should any of your employers continue to bear that burden? 
       So we would have millions and millions of Americans all of a
       sudden becoming uninsured, which is absolutely the opposite
       of what we want to see happen.
       
          The second problem is that you would have to
       provide some kind of subsidy for low income people.  And if
       you try to provide an individual subsidy where you had to
       track each individual, and if you could not predict how many
       more individuals would be thrown into that pool that would be
       needing help because employers would be dropping them from
       coverage, you would have a very big amount of money having to
       come from the federal treasury that you could not count on or
       really specify from year to year.
       
          You would also probably have to use the IRS system
       to keep track of individuals, and I personally am not
       enthusiastic about using the IRS system to keep track of my
       health care insurance.  So I don't know that that's a very
       good alternative.  (Applause.)
       
          The third way is to build on what works in America,
       and that is employer-based, shared responsibility insurance. 
       What happens now is that most of us pay something out of our
       own paychecks, and our employer pays something that is a
       benefit to us, and the percentages vary.  Some have 100
       percent employer paid, some only have 50 percent, some have
       high deductibles, some have low deductibles, but the system
       in place is guaranteeing health insurance at the work place.
       
          That is an American solution to an American problem
       that has worked well for most of us.  And the President
       believes that if we build on that system, then for the vast
       majority of insured Americans, we are not going to see very
       much change at all.  Every year we will still be contributing
       at the work place, but unlike what happens now, our employer
       won't decide what health plan we have.  We will decide, and
       we will be free to make a new decision on an annual basis.
       
          Now what are the problems with building on the
       existing system?  Well, first of all, there are some people,
       employers and employees, who currently pay nothing.  They are
       the uninsured, and that is a very large group of people and
       one that unfortunately is growing, because many employers are
       finding that it is not something attractive for them -- in
       the existing insurance marketplace -- for them to try to
       continue to provide benefits.
       
          Small businesses in particular are the most
       discriminated segment of the business community when it comes
       to getting fair insurance rates, because they are usually out
       there in the marketplace on their own, or in very small
       groups.  So we have to do a couple of things to make sure
       that moving from where we are now, with the employer-employee
       system, to covering everybody, will work and work fairly.
       
          Number one, we have to provide discounts to small
       business.  We have to cap how much money business would be
       asked to contribute.  We also have to provide subsidies for
       low wage workers so that they can afford their share.  We
       want them to be responsible.  Even people on Medicaid, who
       work, should contribute something.
       
          Right now we have the rather unusual situation of
       millions of Americans getting up every day, going to work,
       paying taxes, not able to afford insurance, not getting
       insurance from their employer, and yet they pay taxes which
       go to provide health benefits to people on welfare who are
       not working.  (Applause.)  That is wrong.
       
          So if we provide discounts and we provide
       subsidies -- we have looked very carefully at how much this
       would cost.  This will lower the insurance cost of the vast
       majority of business that already insure.  If you are a big
       business, a medium sized business, or a small business, and
       you already insure, we can show you how your costs will go
       down, both in the short run, and then, importantly, in the
       long run.
       
          In fact, one of the conclusions of the nonpartisan
       congressional budget office study was that business
       particularly would be saving a great deal of money under the
       President's approach.  Now if you do not insure at this time,
       yes, you're going to have to pay something, and your
       employees, who currently do not have insurance, are going to
       have to pay something.
       
          We will do everything we can to keep the cost low. 
       And if we reform the insurance market, and eliminate the
       experience rating and the cherry picking, and all of the
       activities that have come to make your costs much higher than
       they should be, it will be affordable.  And again, the
       nonpartisan independent studies that have been done have
       demonstrated that is the case.  It has also demonstrated
       there would not be net job loss.  So the two big arguments
       about cost and job loss are ones we are very sensitive to,
       but think under the President's approach we will be able to
       address and provide a base of financial support to businesses
       and to workers with lower income.
       
          Those five points:  guaranteed private insurance,
       outlawing insurance practices that are discriminatory,
       guaranteeing choice of doctor and health plan, improving and
       preserving Medicare, and guaranteeing health insurance at
       your place of employment, are really the underlying
       principles of the President's approach.  There are details
       that will be debated, and should be, as the governor said,
       exactly how all this will be put into practice.
       
          But the net result when we get through with this
       debate is:  if we have done our job right, health insurance
       will be guaranteed.  You will never have to worry about
       losing it.  You will find it far more affordable and
       accessible than you ever have before.  And the country, and
       our business sector in the country, will begin to save money
       that they have had to spend on health care that they then can
       turn around and invest in more productive uses.
       
          So this is an approach that has been thought out. 
       It borrowed from a lot of different approaches to try to come
       up with a solution for the problems we have in this country.
       
          I am confident that as the debate moves forward in
       congress, as people really have to focus on what the
       alternatives are, what the costs are, and how much like the
       President's approach your insurance situation is now, that we
       will end up this year passing comprehensive reform and once
       and for all make good on a promise that every one of us
       should have, going all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt and
       Harry Truman, as Pat said, to guarantee that no matter where
       you live, how old you are, who you work for, or whether
       you've ever been sick, you do not have to worry about having
       your legitimate health needs met.  And that's what we're
       trying to make sure happens this year.  And we need your help
       to make that come apart.
       
          Thank you very much.  (Applause.)
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  Now we'll take questions from the
       audience, and I'd like to ask Eduardo Canallis (phonetic) to
       address the first question.
       
          MR. CANALLIS:  Welcome to Denver, Mrs. Clinton. 
       I'm a member and an organizer with the Service Employees
       International Union.  SEIU, as you know, is one of the
       largest proponents and supporters of health care reform in
       this country because we are the largest health care workers'
       union in the country also.  We're very concerned with
       immigrant bashing in this country because we're organizing
       service workers.
       
          My question to you is:  Are undocumented workers
       and nonresidents, legal residents -- noncitizen legal
       residents -- covered by the health care security act?
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Under the President's approach,
       citizens and legal residents are, undocumented workers are
       not.  (Applause.)  And what we will do -- what we will do is
       to continue to provide the public health and emergency
       medical services that any person is entitled to have, and
       that we want to be able to provide.
       
          But we do not believe we should extend this kind of
       privilege and right, that carries with it comprehensive
       health care benefits, to people who are not citizens or legal
       residents.  We need to take care of our people right now. 
       (Applause.)
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  Our next question comes from
       Barbara (inaudible).
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  Instead of being melded into the
       various state alliances, why can't the federal employees'
       health benefit program, which serves over 9 million federal
       retirees, employees and their families, have a separate
       alliance of their own?  Could you and President Clinton
       support that?
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Well, under the current plan, for
       those of you who are not acquainted with the federal
       program -- which you should be, because you pay for it -- so
       let me tell you a little bit about it.  Under the federal
       employees' health benefit plan, the federal government acts
       as the employer of people like my husband and the
       congresswoman, and workers throughout the country, and it
       acts as an alliance or kind of a buyers' club, if you will.
       
          It goes out into the marketplace, and it says to
       insurance companies and doctors' networks, and other health
       providers, would you like to have a chance to have the
       business of federal employees -- because the federal
       government pays 75 percent of the health care costs and the
       employee is responsible for the remainder.  So every year,
       everyone from my husband on down gets to choose what health
       plan we will join, and then the money flows into that.
       
          The federal government doesn't make the decision. 
       It does not decide what kind of health plan we want.  We do
       that, but they provide the 75 percent employer match.  We are
       in effect asking that something similar be done for every
       person in America, where the employers provide an 80 percent
       contribution, and the employee provides 20 percent.
       
          That is a good model for what we are trying to do,
       but we do not believe there should be a separate system for
       federal employees.  We believe the President and the congress
       ought to live in the same system that every other American
       lives under.  (Applause.)
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  Our next question comes from Father
       Neil Dow (phonetic).
       
          FATHER DOW:  Yes, I've been wondering if you have
       specific targeting for helping people with chronic diseases,
       and even more notably than that, multiple chronic diseases.
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Yes, Father.  One of the things that
       will help people with chronic diseases more than anything is
       guaranteeing them insurance.  People with chronic diseases
       are often locked out of the health insurance market today, or
       have to pay an exorbitant rate, and particularly if they have
       multiple problems overlapping the primary diagnosis.
       
          So what we are attempting to do is to make sure
       nobody is eliminated from coverage, and that there are
       services in addition to the ones that you or I, if we did not
       have chronic diseases, would be entitled to.  So we do have
       rehabilitation services, long-term care, not only for the
       elderly but for those under 65 with chronic problems that
       lead to disability.
       
          So we are very aware of what needs the chronically
       ill have and have tried to build that into the benefit
       package the President has proposed, because that is a group
       of people that have special needs that are expensive and need
       to be addressed.  And so we have tried to do that in the way
       we have approached this whole issue.
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  Steve Berringer (phonetic),
       question?
       
          MR. BERRINGER:  Thank you.  Mrs. Clinton, on behalf
       of region 11 of the AFL-CIO, I want to thank you, for all of
       us, for your leadership on the health care issue, and let you
       know that we support your and the President's efforts on
       behalf of the health security act.
       
          During the health care debate, workers have
       repeatedly expressed a concern; that concern is the fear that
       their health care benefits would be subject to taxation, as
       some others have proposed.  My question is:  Under the health
       security act, to what extent will, or perhaps won't, health
       care benefits be taxed?
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Under the President's proposal, they
       would not be taxed, because what we do not want to do is
       penalize people who have insurance.  What we want to do is
       increase insurance availability to everybody.  So we do not
       propose taxing benefits in the President's approach.
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  (Inaudible.)
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  I'm with the Denver department of
       social services and the coalition on long-term care, and I'd
       like to know your views on long-term care and how it's
       incorporated into the national health proposal.
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  You know, the whole long-term care
       issue is one that we are hearing more about every day because
       the fastest growing segment of our population are people over
       80, and -- I was laughing.  I ran into Willard Scott a few
       months ago, and I asked him how he was doing.  He said, well,
       one of his problems was that he had so many people who were
       having a 100th birthday that he was thinking of having to up
       it to 105.  (Laughter.)
       
          You know, so it's a problem that we're going to
       have to face, because we are aging.  And I think we are all
       grateful we're living longer, but we want to treat people
       with dignity as they age, and we also want to treat people
       with chronic disabilities who need long-term care with
       dignity.  (Applause.)
       
          What we have done -- what we have done is try to
       listen to people, and what we hear all over the country is
       that people want alternatives to nursing homes.  They want to
       be able to stay in their own homes, with their own family
       members, and get some home health aids and other kinds of
       help.  (inaudible)  -- going to do, but it will save us a lot
       of money if we do it.
       
          I just want to end with a story.  I was in
       Philadelphia, in a hospital, and they were running an adult
       day care for people in their neighborhood.  It was in a kind
       of working neighborhood, a neighborhood of people who worked,
       didn't make a whole lot of money, but a stable neighborhood. 
       And they were finding that a lot of the folks in the
       neighborhood were trying to keep their parents and their
       aunts and uncles at home.
       
          But they couldn't watch them because both parents
       were working, so they would take them to the hospital, to
       this adult day care.  But the hospital had to charge
       something, so it charged $35 a day.  Well, that was too much
       for a lot of people.  They could maybe pay $15 a day, but not
       $35, so the hospital saw a lot of families being forced into
       having their parents and grandparents go into nursing homes,
       because they couldn't afford $35 a day, whereas the state
       would pay thousands of dollars a month if you had somebody in
       a nursing home.
       
          What we want to do is to provide, on a sliding
       scale, some financial support so you can keep people at home. 
       And you can keep them in adult day care and not put them in
       nursing homes, which would save us a lot of money and be a
       more effective way to take care of more people.  (Applause.)
       
          A PARTICIPANT:  (Inaudible) we're running short of
       time.  We'll have to make this the last question, I'm
       afraid -- from Brian Sullivan (phonetic).
       
          MR. SULLIVAN:  The health security act is clearly
       far reaching, and in some areas controversial.  While there
       are a lot of differences in the federal reform movements,
       there is a lot of commonalities.  To avoid deadlock, would
       the administration support a plan that included some of those
       commonalities so we could fix much of what needs fixing now? 
       Or would the millions of Americans who could benefit from
       some of the changes, such as insurance reform, have to wait?
       
          MRS. CLINTON:  Well, if you're asking if we would
       be willing to look at different ways of reaching the
       President's goal, the answer is yes.  But if you're asking if
       the President would be willing to sign a bill that gives you
       something but did not put us on the track to guaranteed
       health care coverage for everybody, the answer is no. 
       (Applause.)
       
          
       
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