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SCHIEFFER： Senator Kerry？ Thirty seconds.KERRY： Once again, the president is misleading America. I"ve actually passed 56 individual bills that I"ve personally written and, in addition to that, and not always under my name, there is amendments on certain bills.
But more importantly, with respect to the question of no record, I helped write —— I did write, I was one of the original authors of the early childhood health care and the expansion of health care that we did in the middle of the 1990s. And I"m very proud of that.
So the president"s wrong.
SCHIEFFER： Let me direct the next question to you, Senator Kerry, and again, let"s stay on health care.
You have, as you have proposed and as the president has commented on tonight, proposed a massive plan to extend health-care coverage to children. You"re also talking about the government picking up a big part of the catastrophic bills that people get at the hospital.
And you have said that you can pay for this by rolling back the president"s tax cut on the upper 2 percent.
You heard the president say earlier tonight that it"s going to cost a whole lot more money than that.
I"d just ask you, where are you going to get the money？
KERRY： Well, two leading national news networks have both said the president"s characterization of my health-care plan is incorrect. One called it fiction. The other called it untrue.
The fact is that my health-care plan, America, is very simple. It gives you the choice. I don"t force you to do anything. It"s not a government plan. The government doesn"t require you to do anything. You choose your doctor. You choose your plan.
If you don"t want to take the offer of the plan that I want to put forward, you don"t have do. You can keep what you have today, keep a high deductible, keep high premiums, keep a high co-pay, keep low benefits.
But I got a better plan. And I don"t think a lot of people are going to want to keep what they have today.
Here"s what I d We take over Medicaid children from the states so that every child in America is covered. And in exchange, if the states want to —— they"re not forced to, they can choose to —— they cover individuals up to 300 percent of poverty. It"s their choice.
I think they"ll choose it, because it"s a net plus of $5 billion to them.
We allow you —— if you choose to, you don"t have to —— but we give you broader competition to allow you to buy into the same health care plan that senators and congressmen give themselves. If it"s good enough for us, it"s good enough for every American. I believe that your health care is just as important as any politician in Washington, D.C.
You want to buy into it, you can. We give you broader competition. That helps lower prices.
In addition to that, we"re going to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare early. And most importantly, we give small business a 50 percent tax credit so that after we lower the costs of health care, they also get, whether they"re self-employed or a small business, a lower cost to be able to cover their employees.
Now, what happens is when you begin to get people covered like that —— for instance in diabetes, if you diagnose diabetes early, you could save $50 billion in the health care system of America by avoiding surgery and dialysis. It works. And I"m going to offer it to America.
SCHIEFFER： Mr. President？
BUSH： In all due respect, I"m not so sure it"s credible to quote leading news organizations about —— oh, nevermind. Anyway, let me quote the Lewin report. The Lewin report is a group of folks who are not politically affiliated. They analyzed the senator"s plan. It cost $1.2 trillion.
The Lewin report accurately noted that there are going to be 20 million people, over 20 million people added to government-controlled health care. It would be the largest increase in government health care ever.
If you raise the Medicaid to 300 percent, it provides an incentive for small businesses not to provide private insurance to their employees. Why should they insure somebody when the government"s going to insure it for them？
It"s estimated that 8 million people will go from private insurance to government insurance.
We have a fundamental difference of opinion. I think government- run health will lead to poor-quality health, will lead to rationing, will lead to less choice.
Once a health-care program ends up in a line item in the federal government budget, it leads to more controls.
And just look at other countries that have tried to have federally controlled health care. They have poor-quality health care.