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

DATE: THURSDAY, November 3, 1994                   TAG: 9411030117
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: NATL/INTL   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON  NOTE: LEDE                                 LENGTH: Medium

REFORM STRATEGY REVISED

Two lesser-known aides - Carol Rasco, domestic policy adviser, and Robert E. Rubin, the head of the National Economic Council - will head the administration's second attempt at health care reform, White House officials said Wednesday.

Rasco and Rubin will work within the normal White House operation, aides said, a stark contrast with the previous health care effort that operated in many ways autonomously of the rest of the White House.

A Aides expect the swap to improve coordination and organization of the health care effort, and said it may offer some political cover from Hillary Rodham Clinton's critics.

They said Hillary Clinton recommended the change, thinking that the health care debate has moved to another stage.

Hillary Clinton, while touring the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York Wednesday, said the administration is still committed ``to do all we can to make changes in the health-care system.''

``I don't think there's any reason to be anything but hopeful that eventually we will make the kind of changes that people consistently say they want,'' she said.

The first lady will likely continue to be a major force in the development of the administration's health care policy, if not as visible as before. Rasco, a former aide to Clinton in Arkansas, has worked closely with Hillary Clinton for years.

``She will play a vital part in health-care policy and strategy, just as she always has,'' the first lady's spokeswoman, Lisa Caputo, said of Hillary Clinton. ``She'll continue to be the public advocate.''

Rasco said that Magaziner also ``will still be part of the effort'' but that the mounds of research and number-crunching done by the so-called working groups that he oversaw does not need to be duplicated in 1995.

``Because there wasn't a massive amount of background work to be done, we thought it was time to move it through the normal policy-making process,'' Rasco said. ``There wasn't a need to have that large group of people working separate from the White House.''

Although any decisions on the 1995 health care package will wait until after the midterm elections, aides said the staffing change signals that Clinton realizes any reforms will be modest.