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

DATE: MONDAY, November 8, 1993                   TAG: 9311110486
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

MORE OR LESS

THE PORTION of the populace that would pay more under its health plan, the Clinton administration said last week, is 30 percent rather than the 40 percent cited a few days earlier.

The revised estimate may make the plan more politically salable, but the reduced percentage isn't merely a convenient contrivance. In the earlier projection, deductibles and co-payments paid out of pocket by currently insured Americans weren't included.

Take those expenditures into account, and the percentage goes down of people who'd pay more under the new plan.

So the new numbers weren't just plucked from thin air; they're not a political fabrication. Yet, neither - as administration officials acknowledge - are they fixed in bedrock.

All such forecasts can be only approximations. In the case of health care, they are more approximate than usual. Much more.

For example, a major contributor to rising health costs is technological advance, the timing and applicability of which are by nature impossible to predict with much precision.

Meanwhile, who'd pay more and who'd pay less than now is not the only relevant question regarding a new health-care plan. Perhaps the most relevant question is how much more than now almost all of us will pay if nothing is done.

This amount is hard to measure, too. But count on it: It would be a lot.

by CNB