Clinton's Plan: DOA?

For a man who was watching two years' work go down the drain in about 48 hours, Ira Magaziner, the architect of Bill Clinton's health-care reform plan, had a strangely delighted air at the White House senior staff meeting last Thursday morning. The afternoon before, the Business Roundtable, a group of corporate executives, had supported the alternative plan drafted by Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee. In a few hours, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would use harsher language to reject the Clinton approach. Earlier in the week, Clinton offered to trade away two key elements of Magaziner's design in order to...