Perot Calls for Fight Against Health Plan : Politics: Texas billionaire tells supporters that Clinton proposal will hurt nation. He also decries U.S. moral decay.

Ross Perot on Friday called for a massive grass-roots effort in support of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution as a way to block spending for President Clinton’s health care reform plan, which he claimed would worsen the national condition.

Speaking to members of United We Stand, America, Inc., the political organization he founded, Perot depicted an America ridden by debt and weakened by moral decay.

“Everybody is being programmed day after day to believe that government is going to give you free candy,” Perot said. “There is no free candy. Somebody has to pay for it.”

He ridiculed claims by supporters of Clinton’s agenda that new spending for the health care plan would be offset by cost cuts in Medicare and Medicaid as well as other savings.

“We’re dumb, but we’re not stupid,” Perot said.

After saying that the federal budget deficit has grown faster in the past 12 years than in the nation’s first 155 years in existence, Perot added: “The health care program has to be squarely on budget. (Spending on health) is 14% of our whole domestic product, and if we mismanage it, we will dig an even deeper hole for our children.”

Perot also argued that the federal government’s past record in health care provides reasons for misgivings about its ability to reform the present system.

He called the hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs “a disgrace to the people who served in the armed forces” and said the cost of Medicare and Medicaid has exceeded initial estimates by tens of billions of dollars.

“So far I haven’t seen any evidence that the government really knows how to run health care,” he said.

Perot said it would be better to test various reform models before launching a nationwide overhaul of the health care system. “A health care plan for a small rural community must be different from a plan for New York City,” he said.

Health care reform will also be a major item on the agenda today when the United We Stand group hears from Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), author of an alternative to Clinton’s plan. The Cooper plan, which calls for a smaller government role, was endorsed earlier this week by the Business Roundtable, an influential group of corporate executives.

In his hourlong talk Friday, the Texas billionaire and 1992 independent presidential candidate decried the damage that he said excessive dependence on the federal government had done to the nation’s moral fiber.

“Washington will not give us a strong moral and ethical base,” he said, calling for Americans to accept responsibility for their own actions.

“We look after people who cannot look after themselves,” he said, but “history tells us that the least effective way to do that is to send your money to Washington.”

Perot criticized the current standards for young people, saying: “You can teach alternative lifestyles (in public schools.) You can teach safe sex. But you can’t teach abstinence.”

Perot, who has been in the forefront of the effort to pressure Vietnam to provide more information about missing U.S. soldiers, did not comment directly on Clinton’s decision Thursday to lift the U.S. trade embargo against the Hanoi government.

But after his talk, he was asked if he thought lifting the embargo would help gain more information about the men who were not accounted for after the Vietnam War.

“Time will tell,” he said. “It would be wonderful if it did. But obviously I would be concerned after watching it for 20 years and understanding the people involved.”