Now, I recognize that other plans have been put forward that would cost $80 billion or even $100 billion and that would put our whole health care system under the heavy hand of the Federal Government.  This is the wrong approach.  This has been tried abroad, and it has failed.  It is not the way we do things here in America.  This kind of plan would threaten the quality of care provided by our whole health care system.  The right way is one that builds on the strengths of the present system and one that does not destroy those strengths, one based on partnership, not paternalism.  Most important of all, let us keep this as the guiding principle of our health programs.  Government has a great role to play, but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the Federal Government.

Many of you will recall that in my State of the Union Address 3 years ago, I commented that “Most Americans today are simply fed up with government at all levels,” and I recommended a sweeping set of proposals to revitalize State and local governments, to make them more responsive to the people they serve.  I can report to you today that as a result of revenue sharing passed by the Congress, and other measures, we have made progress toward that goal.  After 40 years of moving power from the States and the communities to Washington, D.C., we have begun moving power back from Washington to the States and communities and, most important, to the people of America.

In this session of the Congress, I believe we are near the breakthrough point on efforts which I have suggested, proposals to let people themselves make their own decisions for their own communities and, in particular, on those to provide broad new flexibility in Federal aid for community development, for economic development, for education.  And I look forward to working with the Congress, with members of both parties in resolving whatever remaining differences we have in this legislation so that we can make available nearly $5 1/2 billion to our States and localities to use not for what a Federal bureaucrat may want, but for what their own people in those communities want.  The decision should be theirs.

I think all of us recognize that the energy crisis has given new urgency to the need to improve public transportation, not only in our cities but in rural areas as well.  The program I have proposed this year will give communities not only more money but also more freedom to balance their own transportation needs.  It will mark the strongest Federal commitment ever to the improvement of mass transit as an essential element of the improvement of life in our towns and cities.

One goal on which all Americans agree is that our children should have the very best education this great Nation can provide.