Harry and Louise, health care reform's best-known naysayers, were off the air in a four-month hiatus prolonged by a deal between their handlers -- the Health Insurance Association of America -- and an annoyed Dan Rostenkowski. But with Rosty no longer the House Ways and Means chairman, the angry suburbanites returned to television last week in a $2 million ad campaign, fretting about proposed price controls that HIAA says would hurt small and midsize insurance companies. Their voices are two of many in a babel of televised messages. A slew of ads push the positions of big insurers, health maintenance organizations, dental insurance plans and labor unions -- and more are due as Congress heads into its July 4 recess.
The competing claims of different interest groups may have created a climate of hesitance on making any change in health care -- especially when liberal advocates of a single-payer system are just as tough on the Clinton plan as are its conservative critics. "The last time there was a health care reform effort, under Richard Nixon," notes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, "it was not killed by the right alone but by the right and the left acting in tandem."
