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

DATE: FRIDAY, October 29, 1993                   TAG: 9310290154
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HEALTH PLAN WOULD RAISE COST TO MANY

About 40 percent of insured Americans would have to pay more for health coverage under the Clinton administration health plan, administration officials testified Thursday and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., questioned whether Americans would go along.

The administration estimated that 25 percent of Americans with health insurance would pay more for better benefits and 15 percent, mostly young people who pay little because of their age and good health, would pay more for the same benefits under the Health Security Act.

"If 40 percent of insured Americans are going to pay more, we're going to have to persuade some of those that they're going to get more and others that, on balance, it's their civic duty," Moynihan said. "We're not always very good at that. But if we're not very good at it, that means no."

When Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala suggested "a few people will pay more" for health insurance, Moynihan jumped in. "How few of them are there?" he asked.

Moynihan estimated that 120 million Americans might have to pay more in the first year, a figure with which Shalala did not quarrel.

Kenneth Thorpe, an HHS economist, said that while some Americans might pay more in the beginning, in the long run the great majority would pay less because the Clinton plan would hold down increases in overall health costs.

Thorpe said about 90 percent of those who would have to pay more would face premium increases of $500 or less a year. The other 10 percent would not pay more than $1,000 more.

Most of the six competing health proposals in Congress include provisions requiring insurance industry reforms. Health economists say most would likely increase many people's insurance premiums for a few years.

President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton made their first out-of-town sales call for their revamped plan Thursday, on 1,500 medical students, doctors and nurses at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Clinton told them, "You are what's right with the system.

"We spend more money [than other countries] on medical research, more money on technology - we don't want to give that up."

Keywords:
INFOLINE

by CNB