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

DATE: MONDAY, September 27, 1993                   TAG: 9309270113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From the New York Daily News and The Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

CLINTON: FAMILIES' PREMIUM $4,200

President Clinton brought his campaign to sell his health care reform plan to the Future Diner in Queens on Sunday in a marathon session that had all the elements of an afternoon talk show, with the microphone-toting president as sympathetic host.

Seeking to assuage worries about high premiums, Clinton revealed - for the first time - that a family would pay an estimated annual average premium of $4,200.

For 90 minutes, the president listened to eight hand-picked New Yorkers' stories of medical problems.

Marcia Callender of the Bronx broke into tears as she recounted how she could not get health insurance for her terminally ill son because his was a "pre-existing condition."

Callender's son, Matthew, died in December at age 6 - and as she got to that part of her story, Clinton, seated beside her on a diner stool, reached over and patted her back comfortingly.

Liver-transplant patient Mary Jane Van Wyck of Long Island City told Clinton, "I have no medical coverage other than Medicare" to pay for drug costs of $800 a month.

Fellow transplant recipients have given her their extra medicine to keep her body from rejecting the new organ, and Van Wyck recently received a grant for a year's supply of medicine.

"While my life was saved, I'm scared about the future," she said.

Minutes after Clinton left the diner, Van Wyck collapsed from an apparent seizure. Emergency medical technicians gave her oxygen and carried her out. She was released after treatment at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Clinton will ask Congress to impose strict regulations on the insurance industry during the transition to his new health care system.

"We want to make sure that the insurance market doesn't go crazy during the interim period," Ira Magaziner, his senior health care adviser, said.

The reforms would bar insurers from cutting off anyone's health insurance if he or she became sick and would allow workers to stay insured when they switched jobs, even if they or their children have chronic health problems.

Clinton hopes to have a universal health care system in place by mid-1997, with a new rating system making insurance more expensive for the young and healthy and cheaper for the older and sickly.

by CNB