Rick Wagoner Address Quotations

One of our biggest challenges is our lack of cost-competitiveness in the United States, which is due to our legacy costs, especially the ever-increasing burden of high health-care expenses, ... Addressing this challenge in a fair and equitable way requires close work with our union partners, in addition to our ongoing work with government and health-care providers. Gary is the ideal person to do this.

We would welcome a more proactive role from elected officials at the national and state levels in broad-based strategies to address the U.S. health care crisis.

Today we are announcing a significant update on our plan to address our health-care burden, which is the cornerstone of our efforts to reduce structural costs by a $5 billion (US) run rate by the end next year.

GM's top priority is to restore our North American operations to profitability and positive cash flow as quickly as possible. In 2005, we laid out a comprehensive and integrated strategy to address the structural issues that impede our competitiveness and profitability, and we are focused on rapidly executing all aspects of the turnaround plan.

We've got to move more quickly in addressing these challenging, chronic structural-cost issues,

In order to improve financial results in 2006 and 2007, we are moving quickly to implement several important actions that will address these weaknesses in North America. And we have a good line of sight on the steps we need to take to further reduce structural costs on a global basis that will position GM for long-term success.