THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9409300026
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell this week finally made official what everyone else in the capital already knew: Reform of the health-care system along the lines of a massive, centralized ClintonCare-style proposal is dead in Congress for this year and probably for many years to come. Sen. Mitchell blamed congressional Republicans, greedy special interests and just about everyone else except those actually responsible: his fellow Democrats, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, her health-care guru, Ira Magaziner, and the American people.
After all, how is it possible for Republicans, just kicked out of the White House, a badly outnumbered minority in the House and seven seats short of an absolute majority in the Senate, to have killed health care? If there had been overwhelming popular support for President Clinton's proposal, then peeling off three or four GOP senators (never very difficult under most circumstances) to end the possibility of a filibuster should have been child's play.
The key, however, is that the plan was not popular. White House spin doctors claim that the high-powered insurance lobby painted the plan in morbid hues in its ``Harry and Louise'' commercials. But that excuse won't wash. Powerful lobbies can and have been beaten. (President Reagan passed his 1986 tax reform over the objections of the lobbyists of ``Gucci Gulch.'') Few lobbies can get in the way of something that the public demands.
Far from being misleading, many Americans suspected Harry and Louise were all too close to the truth. A major turning point came when Manhattan Institute scholar Elizabeth McCaughey (who might well be the next lieutenant governor of New York) sat down and actually read the text of the reform bill the first lady and Ira Magaziner had proposed. She found restrictions on physician choice, price controls, criminal penalties for bribing a doctor or hospital and much more. Someone else did an analysis and discovered that the words ``penalty,'' ``restrict'' and ``violate'' appeared more times in President Clinton's health-care bill than in his crime bill.
And there were some powerful lobbies in favor of socializing health care. The auto industry, eyeing an opportunity to dump its health costs onto smaller businesses or the taxpayer, by and large supported the White House. It was small-business lobbyists, notably the National Federation of Independent Business, that called attention to the danger to jobs of employer mandates.
At bottom, however, the fact that probably mattered most was that this is 1994, not 1934 or even 1964. Government at all levels is now taking over 40 percent of the average American's paycheck, and few are the people who believe they are getting a dollar's worth of services for a dollar's worth of taxes. The public had seen enough of government at work to be skeptical about claims of miraculous cures.
Some Democrats, notably Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who sought to convince the White House to back his own scaled-down (though still badly flawed) health-care-reform plan, tried to divert the Clinton administration from its statist path. That effort failed, however, and health-care reform collapsed. But it wasn't Republicans who toppled it. The plan failed because it deserved to fail. by CNB