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

DATE: TUESDAY, July 19, 1994                   TAG: 9407200060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                  LENGTH: Medium

GOVERNORS STRADDLE HEALTH CARE DEBATE

Democratic governors demanded Monday that Congress guarantee health coverage to all Americans, but their silence on how to pay for it undermined White House hopes for help in the reform debate.

To counter the Democrats, GOP governors inched closer to backing Senate Republican leader Bob Dole's health care proposal, provided Dole abandons his call for caps on Medicaid and finds a new way to pay for his plan.

The developments set the stage for a showdown today between President Clinton and Dole at the closing session of the National Governors Association summer meeting.

Keeping with NGA tradition, the partisan maneuvering was polite. The governors stressed they had far more bipartisan consensus on health care than members of Congress and were eager for major reform to be passed this year.

And neither side planned to propose any major changes to the NGA health care policy adopted in February. That document endorses an array of insurance reforms and subsidies for low-income Americans but stops short of calling for universal coverage or offering any financing proposal.

The Democratic governors' resolution was designed to give Clinton a political boost, and White House aides insisted it did - by putting a majority of the nation's governors on record supporting ``guaranteed health benefits that cannot be taken away.''

But the Democratic Governors Association document's silence on financing left it with little political muscle, despite a weekend of negotiations with White House officials over how the Democrats could come to Clinton's defense.

The Clinton administration fared better with the governors on the new world trade agreement, getting bipartisan backing after assuring them the deal would not infringe on state sovereignty.

The support at the National Governors Association meeting was not unanimous, however, and even a few backers of the accord under GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, worried about how the administration would pay for its implementation.

U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor promised Virginia Gov. George Allen that the administration would not try to increase taxes or fees on U.S. ports to help make up the lost tariff revenue.

by CNB