ROANOKE TIMES

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

DATE: MONDAY, December 19, 1994                   TAG: 9412200017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium


HEALTH CARE

IN THE JANUARY issue of Atlantic magazine, via the mostly friendly filter of writer James Fallows, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira Magaziner offer their version of what went wrong with the administration's ill-fated health-reform plan.

The plan is no more, of course, but what happened is still worth a look. The health-care "crisis" so fretted about by politician and pundit in 1993 did not suddenly vanish in 1994. Millions of working Americans are still without medical insurance or at risk of losing it. Health-care costs continue to rise faster than inflation. So why did reform fail?

The plan's authors make some reasonable points.

It was savagely mischaracterized by its opponents. The administration's schedule for submitting a bill was thrown off by events outside its control. Many congressional critics, including a number of Republicans, had only a year before supported the same provisions they now fiercely opposed.

But why were mischaracterizations so readily accepted? Why could a few months make so much difference? Why did the GOP start smelling red meat?

The explanation, we suspect, is less to be found in the Clinton-Magaziner excuses, than in problems with the plan and with the process of developing it.

The reform package did turn out to be too cumbersome, complicated and bureaucratic. And the administration early on wasn't willing enough to work with congressional moderates who sincerely wanted health-care reform.

Yet even something like the Clinton plan might have passed, were it not for the administration's political missteps. Polls showed Americans liked the reforms - until surveyers identified them as the Clinton plan.

Most people are not policy wonks. They don't want to know all the details. But they want to have confidence in the details. And when government is or seems to be secretive, people begin to lose confidence - especially when they fear the plan in question embraces the discredited notion that government knows best.

Even Fallows calls "stupid" the health-reform planners' decision to shut out the press during several months of their deliberations. Worse than any effect it had on the press was the effect it had on the general public. What, people asked, are they cooking up in there?

For a president elected with just 43 percent of the vote, pushing a complicated plan in an area that touches directly on most people's lives and threatens powerful special interests, that's a dangerous question. Going undercover in formulating health-care policy - while moneyed lobbyists organized the opposition - wasn't just stupid; it was disastrous.



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