Principle #2:

Savings: Controlling health care costs.

Here's how the Health Security Act will control health care costs:

Limits how much insurance companies can raise your premium. Insurance companies will no longer be able to raise your premiums as they please. Today, insurance companies hike your premiums -- sometimes at several times the rate of inflation -if you get sick, if someone in your family gets sick, and for any other reason.

Introduces competition to the health care marketplace. The Health Security plan will release the chokehold that in today's system, insurance companies have on all of us -- consumers, nurses, doctors, and businesses. Reform will encourage competition -- forcing costs down as health plans compete by offering high-quality care at an affordable price.

Cracks down on fraud. The health security proposal makes health-care fraud a crime and imposes stiff penalties on those who cheat the system. It prohibits doctors from referring patients to outside facilities, like labs, which they own a piece of. It stops the kickbacks that some laboratories give doctors in an effort to get their business.

Asks the drug companies to hold down prescription drug prices. The Health Security plan asks drug companies to take responsibility for keeping prices down, without setting prices. In today's system, overcharging runs rampant --certain prescription drugs cost Americans three times more than people pay in other industrialized countries.

Reduces paperwork. All health plans will adopt a single, standard claims form by Jan. 1, 1995. Along with other measures to streamline the system and free nurses and doctors from excess bureaucracy, this will reduce paperwork, cut red tape, and save money.

Squeezes the waste out of Medicare and Medicaid. By slowing the growth of these government programs, the proposal uses funds that have been wasted on excessive charges and funnels them into comprehensive benefits. Under reform, Medicare will be expanded to cover prescription drugs, and there will be a new long-term care program to help cover home- and community-based care. Today, Medicare and Medicaid spending keeps going up and up. But the elderly and poor aren't getting any extra benefits. Health security will change that.

Secttion of President Clinton's speech covering savings