THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 29, 1994 TAG: 9408270028
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
After threatening to keep the Senate in 24-hour session six days a week until November if that was what it took to pass health-care reform, Majority Leader George Mitchell gaveled the Senate to a two-week recess on Thursday night. Mitchell promises the Senate will try again on health care when it returns. But few doubt that, while health reform might not be dead yet, it is certainly in critical condition.
Mitchell hopes to use the Labor Day break to negotiate a deal with the so-called ``mainstream'' coalition of 20 Republican and Democratic senators. The plan they have offered contains no employer mandates, government alliances or any other lead weights that sank ClintonCare, but it does raise taxes roughly $90 billion. This is ``moderation''?
Far more likely, of course, is that members of Congress will go home to hear how unenthusiastic their constituents really are about turning their health-care system over to the tender mercies of Uncle Sam. A Newsweek poll reports 65 percent of the public think health-care legislation should be delayed until next year, not hastily written in a cloakroom in the waning days of a session right before an election.
The wisdom of waiting was reinforced last week by the collapse of the administration's plan to nationalize the country's vaccine supply. Under the Clinton plan, the federal government would have bought the vaccines itself and stored them in a warehouse in New Jersey for free distribution to all of the nation's children.
The vaccine distribution, supposedly small and simple, was explicitly intended as a ``dress rehearsal'' for health-care reform, a showcase of how government purchasing power could force the price of health-care services downward. The result has been a fiasco of mismanagement and misunderstanding that has crippled the entire nation's vaccination program: Right now, right before school starts and immunizations are due, doctors no longer know where vaccine is coming from or how much it will cost.
With Democratic losses looming at the polls in November, the White House strategy has been to ram through something - anything - before the election. Whatever one thinks of health reform, that is no way to write what its authors declare is the most important social legislation in a generation. Clearly, the administration and congressional Democrats respect the power of the American people. The next question: Will they respect their wisdom as well?
KEYWORDS: HEALTH CARE HEALTH INSURANCE by CNB