Oh Noooo!

Ted Koziol, a retired General Motors assembly-line worker, flew into a passion. At a January meeting in Venice, Florida, called by Republican Congressman Dan Miller to hear his constituents' views, Koziol burst out, "My health benefits are great! Do not touch what I worked 34 years to earn! What our President is talking about now is to tax my insurance or take it away. Right now I can choose my doctors. Regardless of what Hillary says, that's not the case with their plan."

Though he drew loud applause in Venice, Koziol at the time was part of a distinct minority in the nation. But his fears have spread so widely that, just as congressional subcommittees begin serious debates on health care, polls for the first time show more people against the President's plan than for it. A TIME/CNN poll last week by Yankelovich Partners disclosed 45% against, 41% in favor -- a startling swing from 50% for, 33% opposed as recently as January. Some apparent reasons: 70% now think Clinton's plan would make them pay more for medical care; 55% believe that they would have less choice of which doctor to see, and 41% fear that the quality of care they receive would go down, vs. only 16% who expect it to improve. And the more people think they know about health-care reform, the less they like Clinton's plan; the 22% in the TIME/CNN poll who said they understand the debate "very well" opposed it 60% to 37%.

To be sure, what people think they know might not be so. The White House charges that critics have been running expensive ads contending that "there are all kinds of things in my plan that aren't there," as President Clinton put it in an interview on CBS This Morning. Koziol to the contrary, for example, the plan would have little if any effect on the benefits he gets from GM, and it proposes no direct new taxes except for one on tobacco (though new insurance premiums that some companies and workers would have to pay are often considered a tax by another name). As for fears of declining quality of care, a more cogent criticism would be that the Administration has made the benefits it would guarantee to everybody more generous than most insurance plans now provide -- raising a serious question of whether the plan contains anything like an adequate method of paying for them.

Aides preparing Clinton for his CBS interview last week began with a blunt sample question, phrased by political adviser Paul Begala: "Your health-care reform is in trouble, the polls look bad, ((Senate Republican leader Bob)) Dole says your plan is dead." (Actually, Dole carefully qualified his statement, saying "in its present form.") The President's response, says Begala, "was all energy, energy, energy. To Clinton the notion that he's getting into trouble is invigorating." The President and Hillary Rodham Clinton plan an intensified grass-roots campaign to build public support. Bill Clinton gave an example Wednesday by phoning eight people who are struggling to care for seriously ill family members and telling them his plan will assist them to hire help.