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KOPPEP: 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 care. -1 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.

DR. BROOK: The question some patients ask are if you have a pediatrician in one plan and you're in a managed care plan and you need a service your husband needs a service of heart surgery and you want to go to a different plan and take advantage of some of the information that's come out of, for instance, the State of Pennsylvania, on differences in quality of care a by heart surgeon, how do you manage to do that? And how do you realize that the plans will operate in that regard? PRESIDENT CLINTON,: Good question. Let me try answer it. First of all, every person will have, at least, three choices. Most people will have more choices, but every person will have, at least three. And so, let me try say what they would be. You can choose to stay in a traditional fee for service medicine. That is, you pick your doctor and they charge you by the service. That may be more expensive, but it may not be if big networks of doctors get together to offer these services together. In that case, you would have a cardiologist and a pediatrician working together. Secondly, you could go into what's called "a preferred provider organization," which is normally an organization that is organized by health care managers, but that have all kinds of specialists in them. Thirdly, you can go into an H.M.O., which will have a range of specialists, but it will be a closed panel. That is, the people that work there will be on salary, so you may not have the specialists you want. In the first two cases, you'll probably be able to do exactly what you want, for the price that you pay up front. In the third case, if you're in an H.M.O., you'll still be able to say "look, my child is really sick and I want this child to see a pediatrician who's not in this H.M.O., who's in another state, you'll still be able to go to that other state, but that pediatrician will be reimbursed by your insurance plan only at the rate that the H.M.O. pediatrician will be reimbursed, then you would pay the difference. KOPPEL: Okay, Mr. President. We're going to take a short PRESIDENT CLINTON: But that plan will be the cheapest so you'll come out about the same, no matter what. KOPPEL: We're going to take another short break. PRESIDENT CLINTON: The least expensive. I don't like that word - cheap. >i~S~::> s_ .