THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 22, 1994 TAG: 9407220034
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
When George Bush's lips moved on raising taxes back in 1990, he at least stood up and said so, costly as that decision proved to his re-election. The question in 1994 is: Did President Clinton's lips do a similar pirouette on universal health-care coverage in his speech to the National Governor's Conference on Tuesday?
The president insists he has not wavered from his goal, announced with icy clarity during his State of the Union address last January, that he would veto any bill that did not provide universal coverage. In his Wednesday speech, however, the president indicated that ``universal'' did not necessarily mean, well, universal.
``It's impossible to have 100 percent coverage of anything,'' the president said. ``So we know we're not going to get right at 100 percent, but we know that you've got to get somewhere in the ballpark of 95 percent or upwards.''
Congressional Democrats promptly went into an uproar. (Mrs. Clinton's reaction can only be guessed at.) White House staff members had been pressuring Capitol Hill Democrats not to yield on universal coverage, despite evidence gathered during the recent recess that health care is way down most Americans' list of priorities. Now the president himself appeared to be yielding.
And he was doing it while Mrs. Clinton was turning up the heat. (Her reaction to his Boston remarks must have been interesting.) ``What is the problem,'' she asked rhetorically in a speech this week. ``The 80 percent of Americans who want universal coverage are being drowned out by the 20 percent who don't want to pay their fair share.'' Good old class envy.
What we are witnessing now is the crack-up of ClintonCare as drafted by Mrs. Clinton and Ira Magaziner under the pressure of an election-year deadline. Policy, it seems, scarcely matters any more. The White House knows Republicans are 9 for 9 in major special elections since President Clinton took office and look poised to make major gains in Congress this November. The president is desperate to get something - anything - he can call health reform, because tomorrow may be too late.
Clearly, these are not the conditions under which to reorder one-seventh of the U.S. economy. Members of Congress are forever bemoaning how entitlements have taken over the federal budget. Now is not the time to be creating a massive new entitlement. The potential to do tremendous damage to the best health-care system in the world is enormous.
It's time to step back, take a deep breath, and look at what's really wrong with the health-care system, which are problems of insurance portability and access. The universal confusion now evident in Washington is not likely to fix anything. by CNB