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

DATE: SATURDAY, February 5, 1994                   TAG: 9402050139
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: B-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

UNLIKELY PAIRING POSES HEALTH-CARE REFORM THREAT

One is a relatively junior - and largely unknown - Tennessee Democrat who aspires to the Senate seat once held by Vice President Al Gore. The other, though rapidly becoming an accomplished legislator, is best known to the nation as a character in a television sitcom who bumbled around the deck of a cruise ship in short pants and knee socks.

Reps. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., and Fred Grandy, R-Iowa, are the driving force behind a health plan that is now the only one in Congress commanding significant support on both sides of the aisle. And with the endorsement of their approach by the Business Roundtable and a tacit embrace by the nation's governors, Cooper and Grandy have left the backers of Clinton's plan scrambling to regain their momentum.

How long Cooper and Grandy will stay out in front remains to be seen. To a significant degree, their support is coming from groups more interested in using them to derail the Clinton plan than in writing the Cooper-Grandy blueprint for health care into law.

The political appeal of their plan - widely known as "Clinton lite" - lies largely in what it does not contain: strict cost controls or any mandate that employers provide insurance for their workers. Especially among the business interests that are already lobbying hard on health care, those two features of the Clinton plan are its most controversial.

But they are also its chief tools for achieving the president's twin goals of health coverage for every American and cost containment. The cost containment element in the Cooper-Grandy plan is less stringent than Clinton's, and it makes no claim to assuring health care for all.

Moreover, opponents of the "lite" approach are stepping up their fire.

Cooper in particular is finding himself the object of blistering criticism within his own party for his decision to challenge the most important domestic initiative of the first Democratic president in 12 years.

"He's being used by the Republicans and all the special interest groups that want to defeat the president. I don't know that he sees it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee on which Cooper ranks fifth from the bottom in seniority.

"He's enjoying this national attention, but it's also in his Senate campaign's self interest to go out and do a lot of fund raising with those interest groups," Waxman added.

"I think he's had his best day," added Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va. "To some extent, Jim Cooper is a creation of the media . . . He's just declared himself to be the alternative, and the press has bought it."

Conversely, others contend the two lawmakers and their plan - which also has a handful of Democratic and Republican sponsors in the Senate - are a rare breath of bipartisanship in an institution where most major issues are decided along party lines.

"They're real heroes," said Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., ranking Republican on the Ways and Means health subcommittee where Grandy sits. Although Thomas supports a competing health proposal, he described Cooper and Grandy as "doughboys who threw themselves on the barbed wire so that others could crawl through."

Only five months ago, Grandy noted in an interview Thursday, they were just two more lawmakers peddling ideas for health-care reform that no one was taking particularly seriously.

Explaining how the partnership developed, Grandy, whose career prior to Congress included a nine-year stint playing Gopher on "Love Boat," said, "He wasn't getting as far as he wanted to go, and we obviously weren't getting anywhere with our bill."

So they and a few like-minded colleagues met to see if they could fashion a single package.

Grandy and the Republicans put aside some of their party's traditional distaste for government intrusion and agreed to a requirement that small businesses join health purchasing cooperatives. However, they talked the Democrats into exempting companies with more than 100 workers - a significant loosening of Cooper's original 1,000-employee threshold.