
			 
			 THE WHITE HOUSE

		  Office of the Press Secretary
			(Fairway, Kansas)
_________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                               April 7, 1994

		     REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
			   UPON ARRIVAL

	      Kansas City Downtown Municipal Airport
		      Kansas City, Missouri

5:35 CDT

	  THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much Governor Carnahan, 
Governor and Mrs. Cleaver, Mr. Holden, Speaker Griffin and all of 
you.  Thank for coming out today.  I didn't know there would be 
such a good crowd here.  I'd to stay with you longer, but I'm 
afraid I'll be late to the meeting if I stay too long.

	  I do want to say a word or two if I might.  First of 
all, I thank you for your sentiments, and I thank the Mayor and 
the Governor for what they said.  I've had the opportunity to 
come to Missouri quite a lot since I've been President, mostly 
because of the terrible ravages of the floods that gripped your 
state.  I'm proud of the work that we were able to do together 
and proud of the response of my administration to the problems of 
people during that flood.  (Applause.)  

	  Frankly, the one thing that bothers me is that we can't 
have our national government function all the time the way it did 
during that flood.  Why does there have to be an emergency before 
people will stop using all the hot air and rhetoric that seems to 
grip Washington, put aside the special interests, talk to one 
another, ask what the problem is, and try to get it solved.  I 
ran for President because that's what I wanted to do.  
(Applause.)

	  When I was the Governor of your neighboring state to 
the south, it never occurred to me that I could get by day in and 
day out just on hot air.  It never occurred to me that the 
purpose of politics was to try to take words and push people to 
the furthest extreme, to the left or the right.  And I ran for 
President because I got tired of all the rhetoric -- people 
saying government couldn't do anything, or government could do 
everything; people saying everybody out there is on their own; or 
people saying that people had no responsibility to improve their 
own lot.  And I felt that if we could pull this country together 
and face our problems, we could go into the next century with the 
American Dream alive and well.  That's what we're trying to do, 
and we've made a good beginning on it.  (Applause.)  

	  I just want to point out that in the 15 months that 
I've been President, since we got our economic plan in place, 
trying to drive down interest rates and drive up investment, our 
economy has produced 2.5 million jobs, 90 percent of them in the 
private sector, more than were produced in the previous four-year 
period.  (Applause.)  After 12 years of talking about the deficit 
while the national debt tripled, if the Congress adopts the 
budget I have given them now, we'll eliminate 100 federal 
programs, cut over 200 more; have the first decrease in 
discretionary domestic spending since 1969; and we'll have three 
years of declining government deficits for the first time since 
Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri, was President of the 
United States of America. (Applause.)

	  One of the things that bothers me is that sometimes I 
think that out here in the country folks are worried that 
nothing's getting done in Washington because of what they read 
about in the papers.  Let me tell you, we are moving more rapidly 
to do more things than we did even last year; that Congress is 
moving forward at a record pace on the budget; the Congress will 
take up a crime bill as soon as it comes back on Monday, which 
will put 100,000 police officers on the street; take assault 
weapons off the street -- (applause); it will stiffen penalties 
and reduce parole for seriously dangerous repeat violent 
offenders; and it will give our children the means to have 
recreational facilities; alternatives to imprisonment for first 
offenses; and other things that will give them a chance to avoid 
the trouble that has come to so many people in the high crime 
areas of our country.  We can do better, and we're going to with 
that crime bill.

	  We have an education bill that we just passed, that for 
the first time in the history of the country provides world class 
standards for all of our schools and encourages grass roots 
reforms to achieve them.  (Applause.)  Soon after the Congress 
comes back we're going to pass the school to work bill, which 
says to all the kids that don't go on to four year colleges, we 
care about you, too -- your education, your training, and your 
future's important.  We want you to be able to get at least two 
years of further training after you leave high school.  

	  These are the kinds of things that we're doing up 
there.  And I came here tonight also to talk about this health 
care issue.  Let me remind you, my fellow Americans, that health 
care in American costs 40 to 50 percent more of our income than 
any it does in any other country; and yet we're the only advanced 
country that doesn't provide health insurance to all of our 
people, so that all of our people have health care security.  

	  Let me remind you that people on welfare get health 
care paid for by the government.  But if someone leaves welfare 
and takes a minimum wage job without health insurance, then that 
person puts her family at risk; the kids don't have health 
insurance; and you start paying taxes for somebody who wouldn't 
go to work to have health care.  That is crazy, and we can do 
better.  (Applause.)

	  Let me remind you that we have 81 million Americans --
81 million of us live in families where somebody's been sick --
where there's been a child with diabetes, a father with a heart 
attack, a mother with cancer.  And they have what the insurance 
companies call preexisting conditions, which means that under the 
present system, you either pay higher insurance rates, you can't 
get insurance at all, or you can never change you job, because if 
you do you lose your health insurance.  No other country 
tolerates that.  We live in a country where the average 18 year 
old will change jobs eight times in a lifetime; when people in 
their 50s and 60s are losing their jobs, having to find new ones; 
and they can't get health insurance now because they're older and 
their rates are higher than younger people.  That is wrong.  We 
can do better.  And we can do better without messing up what's 
good about America's health care system.  (Applause.)

	  So all of my adversaries on this health care thing, I 
wish just everybody would just tone the rhetoric down and talk 
about the real existence of real problems and how we can solve 
them.  The truth is I don't want the government to run the health 
care system.  It's a private system, it ought to stay private.  
What I want is guaranteed private insurance for everybody.  I 
want all of you to be able to choose your doctor or your health 
care plan, not just once, but every year.  More and more workers 
and their families are losing the right to choose their health 
care plan.  I want to guarantee it for all Americans.  And I want 
people to be guaranteed those benefits in the workplace just like 
most of us are today.  

	  And finally I want small business people and self-
employed people to have access to the same good competitive rates 
that those of us in government and big business do today.  I 
think that is fair, reasonable and just.  And if we don't do it 
we're going to continue to have serious problems in this country.

	  I hope you will help us provide health care security 
for all.  We've been fooling with it for 60 years.  We haven't 
done it yet.  And what have we got to show for it -- continued 
problems.  We can do better, and this year we're going to with 
your help.

	  Thank you very much and God bless you all.

			       END5:40 P.M. CDT

