Bending A Promise

Read my pen. Americans admired Bill Clinton's nerve and determination last January when he told Congress he was willing to compromise on every aspect of his proposal except one: universal coverage. "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away," he told Congress in January, "you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again."

But this is no time for bravado. In an attempt to jump-start a stalled legislative process, the President last week indicated to key Senators that he might be willing to accept a much slower transition to universal coverage than he had originally proposed. And instead of requiring all employers to provide health insurance to workers by 1998, Clinton added, they could be merely encouraged to do so for a few years. If universal coverage didn't result, he suggested, his so-called employer mandates would finally kick in. "I made clear," the President later said, "that I was very flexible on how to solve this problem."

Clinton's latest display of elasticity hardly compares on the flip-flop scale to George Bush's welshing on "Read my lips: no new taxes." Still, the stakes for the President are daunting: he must deliver health-care reform this fall to keep his presidency afloat, but he must redefine "universal coverage" to deliver reform. If he gives away too little on that issue, the legislation will falter; if he gives away too much, he may lose liberals who support his plan and get blamed for breaking his unusual veto promise as well.

Nonetheless, Clinton's willingness to bend is the best indication that he may see a reform package on his desk this fall. For weeks, Senate Finance Committee chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been trying to convince the White House that he lacked the votes to pass any plan, much less the Administration's grandiose scheme. The sticking point has been Clinton's employer mandates, which would require employers to pay 80% of the cost of health insurance for all full-time workers. Fearing depressed profits and warning of layoffs, small-business lobbyists generated enough opposition to effectively kill that provision. What Moynihan then needed was a signal from Clinton that he was prepared to accept some other mechanism to bring about Clinton's goal of universal coverage.

Last week the White House finally got Moynihan's message: "We were running out of time," explained an Administration official. "It's time to make this thing happen." The new vehicle, called a "trigger," was proposed by Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a moderate Democrat who is developing a reputation as a breaker of logjams. Breaux wants to postpone the employer mandate for small companies until the end of 1997; in the meantime new subsidies and tax incentives would encourage small businesses to insure their workers. If small companies, defined as those with 25 employees or less, failed to insure 97% of their workers by then, the mandate would be "triggered."