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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 29, 1993                   TAG: 9309290114
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From Newsday and The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HOUSE TOLD PUBLIC WANTS CARE REFORM

HER HUSBAND'S health-care plan, which she helped form, was Hillary Rodham Clinton's topic in the first of hearings introducing it to Congress.

Speaking not simply as the first lady but as "a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman," Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday opened congressional hearings on the administration's health-care plan.

For hours Clinton unshakeably defended the plan - even as she acknowledged it could force up to 10 percent of Americans to pay more for the same benefits they now receive.

Sacrifice, she said, will have to come from every corner in order to revamp a $900 billion health-care system she said had careened out of control, leaving 37 million people uninsured and "literally hundreds and hundreds" of others at risk of losing their health care.

Referring to the debate that will get started in earnest as soon as President Clinton sends the plan in legislative form to Congress in about two weeks, she fervently warned against "politics as usual."

"The American people rightly are watching all of us," she told the House Ways and Means Committee in a measured but firm tone. "They are impatient, but they are also hopeful. They want change; they expect change.

"The upcoming debate is not about any one set of citizens but all of us," she added.

Clinton said for the first time that 10 percent to 12 percent of people who would be insured under the proposal would pay more money for the same health benefits they now have, and that 20 percent to 22 percent would pay a "little bit more" for better benefits. Most others, she said, would pay less for better coverage.

The cost of universal coverage to the U.S. economy and to average Americans was the source of much concern among the lawmakers on the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees. So were how the plan would be financed, whether caps on insurance premiums were feasible and right, whether $238 billion really could be saved from the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and how much of an impact the plan would have on small businesses.

"I want to be honest about it, there are some people who will have to pay more," Clinton told the Energy and Commerce Committee. "Yes, you will pay a little more now, but as you age . . . you will have the benefit" of guaranteed health care.

Also on Tuesday, new Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders said taxes on alcohol as well as tobacco products should be increased "to support what they cost the public in health-care expenditures."

Elders strayed from the White House's position that tobacco products alone should be taxed to pay for the health-care plan.

by CNB