The 95% Solution

George Mitchell knew what he was talking about when he took himself out of the running as a Supreme Court nominee a few months ago. He argued then that it was more important for him to remain in the Senate as majority leader so he could push through the President's health-care plan. At the time, many people assumed that he was also keeping himself available to become major-league baseball commissioner after he retires from the Senate in January. Judging from the health-care proposal he introduced last week, a watered-down approximation of Clinton's universal-coverage plan, he might get to fulfill the first job and increase his chances at the next. If his intricate gambit can attract enough wavering Democrats to salvage part of the President's initial vision, Mitchell will not only have delivered the biggest victory of Clinton's term so far; he will also have proved to the baseball-team owners that he knows how to execute a spectacular save.

If it works. With the Senate opening debate this week and the House set to follow on Aug. 15, the original Clinton plan is no longer on the table and the frantic Democratic leadership in both houses is without an alternative that has enough votes so far to pass. Having got the President's enthusiastic endorsement during his press conference last week, Mitchell's proposal now represents the only game in town for Senate Democrats -- and one they have just begun to play.

No sooner had he introduced his bill than Mitchell was calling it "a starting point." Translation: he could count on only about 40 or so votes to support it. Not just politics but principles are involved in this fight. Mitchell knows that if he cannot revise his plan sufficiently to attract a majority, it could be the end of Democratic hopes to shape health-care reform their way. Republicans would be happy to delay the passage of any bill until after the November elections, which are likely to strengthen their numbers in both houses.

As a starting point, Mitchell's plan is full of ingenious devices for reconciling the conviction that health-care reform is a good thing with the no-less-common belief that paying for it is not. It aims to achieve coverage for 95% of all Americans by the year 2000, when a federal commission would make recommendations on how to cover the remaining uninsured. If Congress failed to take action, a provision would take effect in 2002 requiring employers in companies with more than 25 workers to pay 50% of their workers' insurance costs. That two-stage procedure manages to acknowledge Clinton's ever fainter insistence on universal coverage while it offers Congress one of those agreeably far-off target dates -- the turn of the century, no less -- that lawmakers cherish.

The gist of Mitchell's idea is to have everybody buy his own insurance. As with the original Clinton plan, his would forbid insurers to reject any applicant because of pre-existing health problems. The bill would also place limits on how much premiums could rise, in part through a 25% tax on health- insurance plans whose premiums grow faster than an approved rate. The poor would get government help to pay for coverage, with the subsidies going first to poor children and pregnant women. Funding would come partly from a new tax on cigarettes of 45 cents a pack and through savings in Medicare and Medicaid.