Surrounded by New York Democratic politicians, Hillary Rodham Clinton went to Kings County Hospital Center for an hour yesterday morning and left without saying a public word about the bitter construction controversy that has embroiled it, or indeed about the national health-care proposals that were her ostensible mission for coming.
With Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Representative Major R. Owens and Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr. as eager escorts, Mrs. Clinton met with doctors and toured a trauma unit, a nursery and an old-fashioned 14-bed general medicine ward whose scuffed red linoleum floors had been waxed and buffed just hours before. But reporters were confined to one corner of the ward, and she took no questions.
When Phillip Lambert, a 39-year-old truck driver with pneumonia and no insurance, tried to ask her what she could do about Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's moratorium on the hospital's $1 billion reconstruction, which has been plagued by delays and huge cost overruns, he did not get very far.
"Mr. Moynihan cut me off and said, 'No politics,' " said Mr. Lambert, who sat on his bed in a blue striped bathrobe after the First Lady went down the hall to a meeting with administrators and then to a luncheon fund-raiser on Wall Street for four Democratic women from around the country running for re-election to the Senate.
'Caseload Is the Issue'
"There's nothing I can do about that," Mr. Lambert said, "but I got the attention of all those politicians around her."
Mr. Lambert did not have to work to get that. The politicians all said they hoped Mrs. Clinton's visit would throw a spotlight on the problems of urban medical care, at a public hospital where 45 percent of the patients have neither Medicaid nor private insurance, forcing local government to pick up the difference.
"This was a chance to see New York at its most emphatic," said Mr. Moynihan, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, whose approval will be vital for any health-care legislation, and who invited Mrs. Clinton. "Caseload is the issue. We didn't come here to talk real estate, but to talk caseload."
In fact, the two are inextricably linked. Mr. Giuliani has put the reconstruction on hold because it was drawn up more than a decade ago and calls for building a giant 1,200-bed hospital with many medical specialists at a time when the hospital's inpatient population has declined and the latest thinking in the field -- including the reforms backed by Mrs. Clinton -- calls for de-emphasizing specialties and patient beds in favor of outpatient care for basic needs.
And Mr. Owens said that even without directly discussing the construction problems, Mrs. Clinton had effectively acknowledged the issue.
'The Right Time'
"She was touching on it by emphasizing the fact that this facility is always going to be needed," he said. "Without getting into the details of our local politics, and what our Mayor should do with his budget -- I can see she wouldn't want to get involved in that -- the point has been made. I think she came at exactly the right time."
The visit also came at the right time for Senator Moynihan, who is facing a re-election challenge in the Democratic primary from the Rev. Al Sharpton. He had been planning for some time to visit a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, an aide said.
