
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 1, 1993                   TAG: 9310010334
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

FIRST LADY `ALL FOR' GUN, AMMO TAX

Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress on Thursday that, "speaking personally," she would support a tax on guns and ammunition to raise money for health-care reform and to highlight the link between violence and health costs.

"I'm all for it," she declared in a response to a suggestion by Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., that Congress should impose a 25 percent sales tax on handguns to "tax directly the purveyors of violence."

"I just don't know what else we're going to do to get a handle on violence. We will look at your proposal," she said, although White House officials said later there is no plan to include it as a way to finance health reform.

Bradley said a 25 percent tax on handguns and raising the gun dealer license fee to $2,500, from its current $30 to $70, would raise $600 million.

Early in the formulation of its health-care policy, the Clinton administration considered a tax on guns and ammunition, sources said. President Clinton raised the link between guns and health in his speech to Congress a week ago and since then various legislators have taken up the call.

"It is a political judgment and a personal judgment the president made," said White House health-care spokesman Kevin Anderson. Other officials said the administration did not want to take on the pro-gun lobby, but that it was hoped members of Congress might add it on their own.

The topic came up during Clinton's third day of testimony on Capitol Hill, this time before the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., who recently called the administration's financing plan a "fantasy."

In contrast, Moynihan on Thursday went on a polite probing expedition and Clinton, in turn, was effusive in her praise of things relating to New York, including the chairman.

Moynihan and some other senators questioned the administration's belief that the new program could squeeze enough waste out of the current health-care system to fund its subsidies for low-income workers and small firms.

There can be "no rosy scenarios, no smoke and mirrors, no juggling the books," said Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kan. "Someone will have to sacrifice."

The White House believes it can force the private health-care system - through incentives to be competitive and limits on annual increases in health premiums - to become more efficient and provide quality medical care.

"If I have any misgiving . . . it is a misgiving based on history," said Moynihan. "You have done more to attempt to quantify the cost as accurately as possible as I think can humanly be done, but I would still bet a dime to a dollar they're wrong, and maybe that's just 25 years of being burned."

by CNB