The Senate Finance Committee meets today to deal with two proposals that define Republican and Democratic differences on health reform.
Of five Senate and House committees, the finance panel, with a philosophical makeup closely reflecting the Senate as a whole, is considered most likely to produce the leading version of a health bill the full Senate will vote on.
For that reason, new bills from Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kan., take the spotlight.
Moynihan's 143-page proposal is an effort to balance President Clinton's aim of insurance coverage for everyone with political reality. Clinton's financing method, a requirement that all employers insure their workers, has come under fire from Republicans and some Democrats.
Moynihan delays the requirement. He aims to see 96% of Americans insured as early as 1998 using laws making insurance easier to get and harder to cancel, subsidies for the poor and some new taxes.
His bill sets coverage targets that, if not met, would trigger the requirement, called an "employer mandate."
Moynihan suggested the difference between universal and 96% coverage is semantic. Universal coverage, he said, "is 100%, less what you lose in the normal confusion of life."
Dole's 26-page draft is intended to take his party's lead, shifting the focus back from a small group of moderate Republicans who helped write a bill last week that was a basis for Moynihan's plan.
The Dole bill is designed to help the uninsured get coverage using tax breaks for workers and subsidies for the poor.
It does not propose to guarantee everyone coverage. It would be financed by reducing growth in Medicaid and Medicare spending.
"We can say no taxes, no mandates, no bureaucracy," said Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., ranking Republican on the finance panel and co-author of Dole's bill.
USA TODAY, June 29, 1994
FOCUS
Moynihan copied his employer-mandate trigger from an earlier proposal by Sen. John Breaux, D-La. But, in an illustration of growing opposition to mandates, Breaux isn't supporting Moynihan's plan.
"It's something that cannot pass," Breaux said Tuesday. "I just offered it. It doesn't mean I have to vote for it. It was a good idea at one time. It's a bad idea now."
Regardless of Finance Committee action, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, said he'll stick by his plan to meld the Finance Committee bill with one passed by the more liberal Labor and Human Resources Committee in floor action next month.
Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means Committee broke an impasse over price controls by voting for standby price controls on premiums and provider services beginning in 2001 if states fail to restrain the growth in health-care costs.
And first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the Economic Club of Washington that if Congress fails to pass a bill guaranteeing all Americans private insurance, "a grass-roots movement" will bring about a Canadian-style, tax-paid health system "around the year 2000, give or take." GRAPHIC: PHOTO, b/w, AP LANGUAGE: ENGLISH LOAD-DATE-MDC: June 30, 1994
