THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 2, 1996 TAG: 9608020511
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 84 lines
This bill allows workers who lose or change jobs to buy health insurance for themselves and their families. It also limits the ability of insurance companies to refuse to cover people who already are sick. That helps up to 25 million Americans - but it doesn't help the 40 million or more who have no health insurance at all.
The House overwhelmingly passed legislation Thursday to make health insurance more available to Americans who get sick or lose their jobs.
The bill, which is endorsed by virtually every medical group in the country, would allow workers who lose or change jobs to buy health insurance for themselves and their families and would limit the ability of insurance companies to refuse to cover people who already are sick. As many as 25 million Americans could be helped by the bill.
It passed 421 to 2. Democrats Pete Stark of California and Pat Williams of Montana voted no.
``It means guaranteed health insurance for everyone who's in the system,'' House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said.
But the legislation would not help the roughly 40 million Americans who have no health insurance.
The Senate is expected to pass the bill today, despite some last-minute fireworks over the removal of mental health coverage and a special-interest drug patent extension that appeared overnight in the final version of the legislation. President Clinton has said he would sign it.
The Senate, meanwhile, approved the welfare reform bill in a 78-21 vote Thursday night, sending the bill to President Clinton. The president announced Wednesday that he would sign it after wavering for weeks and having already vetoed two similar welfare bills.
The health legislation is a small step compared with Clinton's ambitious effort two years ago to provide universal health care coverage to all Americans and impose controls on the cost of insurance. But it does address the concerns of millions of Americans that they would lose their health insurance if they got sick or lost their jobs.
The health care bill also includes an experimental program of tax-exempt medical savings accounts, as well as tax breaks for the costs of long-term care expected to save individuals and employers nearly $8 billion over the next decade. A portion of insurance premiums for long-term care would be deductible, as would some of the cost of long-term care.
The terminally ill would be able to draw down their life insurance policies tax-free.
But the measure was stripped of a Senate-passed provision designed to assure parity for insurance coverage for mental illness. House Democrats failed in a last-minute attempt to restore the provision.
Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., said the bill represented a ``radical step forward . . . for working people in America, guaranteeing them that if they have a kid born with diabetes or epilepsy, if they have a heart attack or stroke, they will always have seamless access to the benefits they enjoyed'' in the health policies they bought before illness struck.
Following the defeat of Clinton's plan to overhaul the entire health care system, prospects for any kind of health care legislation were dim until a year ago when Sens. Nancy Landon Kassebaum and Edward Kennedy drafted a proposal to expand access to health coverage. In recent months, passing the legislation became a political imperative for both parties as the fall campaign neared. Finally, after months of partisan bickering, Republicans and Democrats worked out an agreement on the health insurance bill late Wednesday.
Leaders of both parties scheduled news conferences Thursday, well before the legislation even passed, to claim credit with the voters.
Democrats said that Republicans, unable to beat them on health care because of widespread support across the country, had decided to join them.
Republicans called the passage of the health bill - along with welfare reform and other measures in a last-minute legislative blitz before members leave for a monthlong holiday - a historic GOP accomplishment.
``This was a `did something' Congress . . . that truly changed America,'' said Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas. Republicans, he said, used a market-oriented approach to health care, and avoided the big government takeover proposed by Clinton in his more comprehensive plan. MEMO: This story was compiled from reports by The Washington Post and
The Associated Press.
Related story on page A2. by CNB