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Date: Monday, February 2, 1998 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: HHS Press Office (202) 690-6343
Before I begin, I want to thank John Callahan for the excellent job he and his team have done on this budget.
This is the sixth time I've presented the President's annual budget for the Department of Health and Human Services (www.hhs.gov/budget/fy99budget). I'm glad you're back, because we have an important story to tell. This is the first day of a new era at this Department.
This is an historic budget. Because we not only take strong steps for healthy Americans, and strong steps to invest in a healthier future, but because, we once again take strong steps to ensure a healthy economy, by helping to keep the federal budget in balance. In other words, this budget advances family well being -- and fiscal well being.
It's a new day in Washington. By delivering the first balanced budget in 30 years, the President not only closed out the era of big government, he launched a new era of smart, disciplined government -- a government of limited size, but unlimited ideas.
This Department is playing a leading role.
First, by making 159 billion dollars in savings last year in Medicare and Medicaid, helping to erase the federal deficit for the first time in 30 years. In fact, overall savings in Medicare from 1992 to 2003 will come to over 500 billion dollars. That' s half a trillion dollars in savings
We achieve this not by cutting benefits. But by taking advantage of a strong economy, changes in the medical system, and tighter management -- including unprecedented crackdowns on waste, fraud and abuse.
This year's budget continues to reflect our tough management decisions that streamline and strengthen our programs. It includes shrewd financial choices that invest in people by reinvesting our savings. We were joking the other day that Department emplo yees should all wear buttons now that say, "I balanced the budget."
We did it not by squeezing families, but by squeezing every dollar.
This year's budget, with outlays of 380.8 billion dollars, is just 6 percent over last year. It proves that we can take on new initiatives in the context of a balanced budget -- if we are innovative and disciplined. And this budget vividly illustrates h ow much this Department has changed since the budget was last balanced, 30 years ago.
The change is as dramatic as the transformation of a car that many of our families used to depend on: The Volkswagen Beetle.
As you know, Volkswagen has just unveiled the New Beetle. It's a lot different from the 1969 model. This Department is a lot different too. Like the New Beetle, we're completely reconfigured for today's needs -- we're strengthened, streamlined and mo dernized. And with the President's budget plan, we'll also have some new features.
We'll be more efficient. And we'll be more responsive. All in all, the 1999 HHS will be a better vehicle to help carry American families down the road to a healthier, better future. First, the new features.
Last week, the President and the Vice President announced the 21st Century Research Fund, to launch a new era of "path-breaking scientific inquiry." HHS will play the largest role, with new resources for our constellation of stellar research agencies - including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research.
In this budget, CDC will get an extra 25 million dollars to set up a Prevention Research Program, to find new ways to encourage people to reduce their risk of diseases such as heart disease and lung cancer. AHCPR will get a 25 million dollar increase to speed medical findings from the lab to the clinic -- part of our stronger effort to improve health care quality. And NIH will receive its single largest budget increase in its distinguished history: 1.1 billion dollars next year, a down payment on an his toric five-year, 50 percent expansion.
Because today, the pace of medical discovery is limited not by science or imagination, but mostly by resources. The new resources will allow us to boost the number of funded research grants to an all-time high. NIH will redouble its attack on our most defiant diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's, malaria and more. And, we will reinvigorate the War on Cancer, with a 65 percent increase for NIH cancer funding by the year 2003. We're also giving every Medi care patient the chance to participate in a cancer clinical trial, so they can benefit -- and perhaps benefit others.
The Research Fund will yield stunning new insights into the mechanisms of disease and disability, and allow our agencies to take a comprehensive approach to prevention and cure.
Let me give you an example: tobacco. NIH research will help expose and break the addiction power of tobacco. CDC will discover new ways to discourage smoking and encourage quitting. And AHCPR will bring the best anti-smoking strategies directly to the medical profession.
The 21st Century Research Fund is just one way the new budget will help families raise today's children into tomorrow's healthy adults. It is these children -- the children of the millennium -- who will ensure American greatness in the new century. But it is the duty of our generation to give them a chance to be great.
The President's Child Care Initiative will help parents with this awesome task. It is the next crucial step in the President's promise to working families. It comes on the heels of the Earned Income Tax Credit expansion of 1993, the child tax credit of 1997 and the Children's Health Initiative that we enacted last year.
The Child Care Initiative is the largest single national investment in child care in our nation's history. It will provide over 20 billion dollars over five years to working families with children. It will help them relieve their three biggest child car e headaches: Can I get it? Can I afford it? And can I trust it?
This budget helps parents get child care by creating more care, particularly after-school care. It also helps parents afford child care, with 7.5 billion dollars more in grants to states, to help low- and moderate-income parents with their child care cos ts. This expansion will double the number of children served, to two million by the year 2003. This help is crucial to low- and middle-income working families.
Finally, this budget helps parents trust child care, by providing more than 3 billion dollars over five years to improve the quality of care, to train providers and to help states enforce their own health and safety standards.
A crucial part of child care is developing children's minds and imaginations, particularly in the early years. That's why we step up enrollments in Head Start with 4.7 billion dollars next year to advance the President's goal of serving a million childre n by the year 2002. We also will double the number of infants and toddlers in Early Head Start, to serve 80,000 by 2002.
These same families have an extra worry if their children get sick, because many of them have no health insurance. But in fact, many are eligible either for Medicaid or the new Children's Health Insurance Program -- CHIP.
The CHIP program offers coverage for children whose parents earn too much for Medicaid, but whose employers don't offer private coverage. Our new budget provides increased funding for states to spread the news about Medicaid and CHIP eligibility through day care centers, schools and other places that serve parents and children.
Our parents and grandparents have a different worry. There's a bitter irony on golden pond: At the time in our lives when our health is becoming more vulnerable, so is our health care coverage. That's why the President proposed the Medicare buy-in. Aft er all, Medicare was created in the first place to offer a lifeboat to older Americans who couldn't get, or afford, private health insurance.
What's different today is the number of Americans just shy of retirement who are in the same predicament -- those between 62 and 65, and those over 55 who've lost their jobs or their retirement coverage -- through no fault of their own.
Last year, we reformed, tightened and strengthened the Medicare lifeboat to keep it seaworthy into the next century. And this year, we're continuing that effort -- by an all-out assault on those who try to abuse or rip-off Medicare and Medicaid. Let t he crooks beware -- anybody who sees these programs as easy pickings better look again. Operation Restore Trust is coming after you -- stronger than ever.
We're everywhere -- at the federal, state and local level, both public servants and private citizens. We've trained thousands of service providers -- hospitals, doctors, home health agencies and labs -- to recognize and report fraud.
You'll never know who's watching you. When I was in Florida recently, an elderly woman came up to me and said, "I work for you." "Really?" I replied, "What do you do?" And she said -- proudly -- "I'm one of your fraud busters."
With this budget, we're also re-arming ourselves -- with new payment safeguards, with new anti-fraud resources, with investigators, inspectors, hotlines, audits, and civil and criminal statutes. And we're winning -- in fiscal year '97 alone, we returned to the Medicare Trust Fund almost a billion dollars in criminal fines, civil judgments, settlements and other collections.
This budget provides another 138 million dollars to fight waste, fraud and abuse. And legislation we're promoting would give us the weapons to wring an additional 2.4 billion dollars in savings out of the system. Fraud-busting is a smart investment with great returns -- returns that make us more efficient, returns that we can reinvest in people.
We also tap other new funding sources for our new initiatives.
One of them is the tobacco legislation. Make no mistake -- we want Congress to pass it. We expect they will. The American people demand it.
We are also expanding user fees in this budget. Our budget asks companies that profit by doing business with the Medicare system, or get their drugs approved by the FDA, to pay to cover the cost of processing their applications.
Along with the new initiatives and new efficiencies, this budget also keeps our promises. With measures such as advancing the battle against food-borne illnesses and emerging infectious diseases. In 1976, it took 6 months to discover the cause of a ne w killer called Legionnaire's disease. In 1993, it took less than a month to track down the deadly Hantavirus. In 1996, thanks to DNA fingerprinting, it took less than a week to prove that a certain apple juice caused an e-coli outbreak. Today we wan t to identify and head off new outbreaks before they happen.
The new budget includes an additional 75 million dollars to develop and expand national early warning systems for unsafe food and emerging infectious diseases -- so we can attack harmful microbes before they attack our families.
This budget also continues our fight against tobacco. Joe Camel may rest in peace, but we must never rest as long as tobacco continues to lure our children. Our goal is to cut youth tobacco use dramatically and soon -- in part by significantly raising the price of cigarettes and reducing their appeal -- but also by making it difficult for teens to buy them. That's why this budget includes a 100 million dollar increase for the FDA to take the tobacco fight to the retail level, to enlist store clerks a nd managers to prevent sales to children.
While the FDA steps up its fight, we're also boosting funds for state-and community-based tobacco control programs by 50 percent -- to 51 million dollars. These programs work. The CDC will translate the NCI's proven research results into a nationwide pu blic health program in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Our studies show that drug and alcohol treatment also works. So our budget increases block grants to states for treatment programs by 15 percent, for a total of 1.5 billion dollars. And it continues our commitment to preventing drug use in the first pla ce -- particularly among teenagers.
We are also making greater strides in the fight against HIV and AIDS. But we have to fight complacency. Until there is a vaccine, and I believe one day there will be, we must continue to treat HIV as the deadly disease it is. That's why the new budg et includes 1.3 billion dollars for Ryan White treatment activities, a 14 percent increase. That includes 100 million dollars more for more access to combination drug therapies, for a total of 385 million dollars.
Someday, I believe our children will look back on this turn of the century as the dawn of a new golden age for America. When more citizens are living the American dream, with good jobs and the income to buy homes, raise families and educate their childr en. The question before us is: What will we do next? Will we seize this moment to build a better future, or let it pass us by? Will we unite over the dreams and difficulties we share?
The challenge behind these budget numbers and charts is: to harness our political skills not for politics -- but for the health and well-being of our children, our families, our nation. So that one day, as our children look back, they will be proud of h ow we passed our own good fortune to their generation. Thank you.
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