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KOPPEL: Mr. President ... PRESIDENT .CLINTON: That's a huge thing. It's a very important thing. Thanks. KOPPEL: ...I told our audience before we went on the air, let me take this opportunity to tell our audience at home, we have three panels of experts. One in Boston. They're experts on public finance from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A group in Chicago, they're practicing physicians. They're professors of medicine at the University of Chicago and I'd like to turn now to our panel in Los Angeles, they're three experts on public health policy at UCLA. Only one of them, if you would be kind~enough, gentlemen, but I know you have some thoughts on what we've discussed thus far and I need all the help I can get. Please! DR. ROBERT BROOK/UCLA: Mr. President, as a physician I am really quite thankful that you're proposing a health plan that insures all Americans. Since we know from research, that lack of health insurance kills people. What we are a little concerned about is how the plan will assure quality of care for everybody, as you decrease the growth in health services by controlling the amount of money in the system, even if you choose to eliminate waste from the health care system. PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, we will basically have, I think, two assurances of quality of caYe. ~ First of all, the plans that will be provided and the prices that will be offered in these plans will be influenced heavily by the physicians and the other caregivers. But there will be a-lot of incentive to lower costs because your administrative costs will be so much lower. Secondly, the national government, as happens now with the government in different ways, will prescribe certain quality standards and then each state will offer information to people in these plans about not•only the price of services, but the outcomes. For example, as you probably know, Pennsylvania now has a program in which they presently publicized the price of certain services and the outcomes. Arld it enables people to make judgments about both quality and price that they couldn't otherwise make. So, we're going to give consumers more information, we're going to give professionals more capacity to figure out how to manage the system while maintaining quality, and we will have ultimately, government standards as the guarantor of quality practice. - KOPPEL: Go ahead, doctor, if you want to make one more quick comment. Then, we've got to go to a break.