Clinton addresses insurance convention

Friday, June 10, 2005 | 11:06 a.m.

Former President Bill Clinton told a health insurance convention in Las Vegas this morning that in this "more interdependent world ... we need more friends and fewer enemies."

Although Clinton did not mention President George W. Bush or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told a standing-room only crowd of 2,200 attending America's Health Insurance Plans at the Venetian that there is a better way to win the hearts of our potential enemies.

Clinton, who along with Bush's father, former president George Bush, led tsunami relief efforts in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, said "we did not have to kill anybody... we just had to show up ... as human beings to help other human beings."

"The world is more interdependent than in any other time in history," Clinton said, noting that means "we can't escape each other."

Clinton said that while America needs a security system to fight terrorism, "a security system is not enough in an interdependent world" because we cannot kill all our enemies. "We need more friends and fewer enemies ... more partners, fewer terrorists."

Clinton, 58, also talked health issues with the members of the national association representing nearly 1,300 companies that provide health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans.

Clinton told the convention that since leaving the White House in 2000 he has, on behalf of the American Heart Association, taken up the cause against childhood obesity "after my own problems."

"We have to make lifestyle choices," Clinton said noting that childhood obesity has tripled in the last 30 years and that there has been a sharp increase in adult onset diabetes in America's children.

Clinton called food a "cheap commodity" and said today's families eat out 47 percent of the time while kids are exercising less.

"We are building a huge expense into future health care costs," Clinton said, urging that junk-food vending machines be removed from schools and that school lunches are prepared with lower fat and sugar content.

Clinton said there are 40 million Americans without health care insurance while other nations insure their entire populations "at $400 billion less (a year) than we spend."

He said that with Americans filling out countless repetitive health forms that should be automated and Americans paying more for prescription medications they are at "a huge tug of war that nobody wins."