President Clinton's crusade for landmark health-care reform legislation heads this week into a long, hot summer of concession, compromise - and possible collapse.
The backpedaling already has begun on key elements of the plan, including its requirement that business bear the brunt of the costs. That jeopardizes Clinton's bottom-line goal of covering all Americans.
But there is positive news for the president: Congress, in fits and starts, is plowing ahead on health care.
Add to that a more direct involvement by Clinton - evidenced by one-on-one meetings with key lawmakers last week - and the collapse many are predicting may be averted.
"We remain encouraged," says Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman.
Just when chances for major reform look most bleak, Clinton or his congressional allies pull a rabbit from a hat:
-- Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, unable Wednesday to muster the votes for a crucial amendment, returned 24 hours later in partisan lockstep to jump-start their health-care bill.
-- Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, disaffected two weeks ago, returned to the bargaining table and met individually with the president.
-- The nation's top doctors' lobby defeated moves to distance itself from Clinton and his employer mandates, and four insurance groups endorsed insurance reforms.
Those and other developments have kept reform alive on Capitol Hill when naysayers were ready to pull the plug.
"There will never be gridlock," says Rep. Sam Gibbons, D-Fla., acting chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. "We'll keep moving."
For Clinton to add health care to his legislative successes on deficit reduction, trade and gun control, Congress must move fast.
Only two weeks remain until the second deadline Democratic leaders set for committee action; only one of five major House and Senate panels has passed a bill. For that reason, the leaders are less concerned about content than about moving anything at all. They can always combine the best elements of each bill into the version they send to the floor.
Two committees dominated by liberal Democrats are taken for granted. A third, home to moderate Democrats, is deadlocked. That leaves the focus on the two most potent panels:
-- Ways and Means, the House tax-writing committee, is lurching under Gibbons' trial-and-error tutelage. With Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., its chairman since 1981, under indictment, liberal and moderate Democrats pulled together in the clutch last week to keep the legislation on track.
Asked at one point what the hangup was, Gibbons said: "I'm going to give you a thousand-piece puzzle and blindfold you, and ask you to put it together."
-- Finance, which pays the bills in the Senate, is crawling forward under its chairman, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. After proposing a plan surprisingly like Clinton's and suffering GOP guffaws, he's been negotiating insurance reform and benefits on a bipartisan basis, leaving for later the issue of whether to require employers to insure workers.
"We're making a real effort to find not only common ground but a common solution," says Sen. Dave Durenberger, R-Minn., a moderate committee Republican.
To Democratic leaders, what matters most is getting bills through those two committees soon. If Ways and Means produces a strictly partisan product relying on employer mandates and Finance finagles a bipartisan plan without them, differences can be worked out later. But if they take much longer or get deadlocked, chances for health reform in 1994 may be dashed.
Because Finance is considered the committee at the political center, its reluctance to embrace employer mandates has been interpreted as a harbinger of their demise.
Clinton, while listening to a variety of compromise pitches, has stuck to his State of the Union veto threat: He insists on universal coverage.
"The administration's goals have not changed at all," says Altman.
But Durenberger lambasted White House aides for giving Clinton a goal without the means to achieve it.
"They aren't willing to deal with reality," he says. Clinton is surrounded by "numbers, figures, pros and experts. He ought to tell them, 'Give me a bill by the Fourth of July that I can sell.' "
If such a bill emerges - or if Clinton's allies can muscle existing bills through committees and on to the House and Senate floors - the stage will be set for fireworks next month.
So far, no one has written Clinton off completely.
"The plan still has the pulse, the breathing," warned foe Arvind Goyal, an Illinois doctor, in a speech to the American Medical Association last week. "The Clintons will do everything to resuscitate this baby."
