Members of Congress return to Washington today from two weeks in their home states with a caution signal from constituents on health-care reform.
Interviews with nearly two dozen senators and House members reveal strikingly similar reports. Voters want the system fixed, but they fear big government and new taxes.
Opposition to broad reforms such as President Clinton proposes is strong in the South and in rural areas, and in the districts of wavering House Democrats who have been subjected to ad campaigns by small-business and anti-tax groups.
Support for the Clinton plan, which would create a new system of employer-based health insurance to be administered through state governments, is strongest in inner cities, where people want better coverage.
"The overwhelming consensus is, 'We don't want government control in health care,' " says Indiana Republican Rep. Steve Buyer, who just had 23 town meetings in 20 counties.
The feedback lawmakers get back home can be crucial now, seven months before Election Day, when the entire House and one-third of the Senate is up for grabs.
Key members of the House and Senate committees that take up health-care reform this month defended the Clinton plan, with considerable revisions, to skeptics. But their efforts were countered - and, in some cases, almost drowned out - by ad campaigns of business and other groups.
In southern California, Democratic Rep. Lynn Schenk was met by small-business owners who had worked up their costs under the Clinton plan.
"There are those small businesses who do not want to be forced to provide health care at any cost," says Schenk, who is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
In Louisiana, Democratic Sen. John Breaux presided over a series of rural health-care forums and pronounced his flock wishful and wary.
"All of them are hopeful that health-care reform would help them, but they are very concerned about the government having too great a role," says Breaux, a swing member of the Senate Finance Committee.
Maryland's Democratic Rep. Benjamin Cardin was one of six House Democrats to find they could go home again after voting for a version of the Clinton plan last month in a Ways and Means subcommittee.
In Baltimore, he outlined that bill's revisions, including making purchasing cooperatives voluntary.
"They're leery about creating new bureaucracies at the national level, and they're concerned that the bureaucracy will limit their ability to choose their doctor," he says. "When I explain to them the changes that are being made, they seem to feel much better."
On the flip side are Reps. John Lewis, a Democrat from Atlanta, and Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat from Brooklyn. They heard cries for help from the working poor who can't afford health insurance.
"Everybody wants to see some action," says Lewis.
Says Velazquez: "The only concern is, 'Are we going to be left out again? Is this going to be a two-tiered system?' "
Those aren't the concerns voiced in conservative areas like Batavia, N.Y., where GOP Rep. Bill Paxon detects "absolutely no support for the president's approach," and Birmingham, Ala., where GOP Rep. Spencer Bachus hears "not one complaint about quality."
"People don't believe that a government solution is going to increase the quality or decrease the cost. They think it's going to do just the opposite," Bachus says.
Voters have "a healthy skepticism," says Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. "It's not a negative, biting, venal, sarcastic skepticism. They want reform, but they don't want to be gouged."
The real message, says Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., is a distrust of big government solutions. "People feel that Congress and the executive branch of government are not ready at this time to revamp the entire health-care system in this country," he says. "They agree that we should go slower."
