Larry Gage, a lobbyist for public hospitals, was in the middle of writing a letter to President Clinton Tuesday night. “Thank you . . . for your unwavering support for universal coverage” he wrote.
Then he heard. The president appeared to be wavering on universal coverage.
“I lost my enthusiasm,” Gage said Wednesday. “But I wrote the letter anyway.”
Other Clinton supporters also were dismayed after his remarks to the National Governors’ Association Tuesday that 95 percent coverage might be acceptable to him in health-care legislation.
All day Wednesday, White House officials and Clinton health-care supporters scrambled to explain that the president really hadn’t changed his position on universal coverage, even though he sounded like he had. In addressing the governors, Clinton indicated he could be flexible on both universal coverage and on employer mandates-requiring employers to buy health insurance for their workers.
By indicating such willingness to negotiate, he made some friends in conservative and moderate circles on Capitol Hill-“welcome news” as Senate Republicans put it-but he also may have weakened his bargaining position by showing he could be moved on the core details of health reform.
Conversely, Clinton might have been trying to show that he was flexible, while painting his opponents, such as Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) as inflexible, and at the same time attempting to show he is a realist willing to deal with Congress.
But supporters like Gage say it’s too soon for Clinton to be showing flexibility and realism. In a legislative poker game set to end in the fall with a vote on health care, realism and flexibility usually are saved until after Labor Day.
Just before Clinton’s statements became public, staff members of House Democratic leaders were in meetings trying to determine which committees of the Congress would have jurisdiction over employer mandated health insurance coverage-a clear indication they were willing to incorporate the controversial employer mandates into the health bill.
And just 24 hours earlier, White House staffers insisted that employer mandates were the only way to get to universal coverage.
Then Clinton said he would be flexible on that issue, sowing confusion among the congressional staffers.
Clinton argued Wednesday that he had been misinterpreted and that there was no retreat from his insistence that a health-care bill include universal coverage as a goal.
“The point I was trying to make yesterday is that we have no way of knowing, we have no evidence, that there is any available and affordable way to get close to 100 percent of coverage without some sort of requirement that involves everybody paying,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine), who is in the middle of crafting a compromise health-care bill for consideration on the Senate floor early next month, tried to characterize Clinton’s statements to the governors in the most positive light.
“I think the president is handling it in just the right way,” Mitchell said after a meeting with Clinton. “Firm on principle and objective, flexible on the means to achieve those objectives, and I think that’s just the right approach.”
But some in Congress who support Clinton were stunned just as much as was Gage, president of the National Association of Public Hospitals.
Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) said “anything less (than 100 percent coverage) is just totally unsatisfactory” and urged the president to go on nationwide television to clarify his position.
Simon, and Sens. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and Howard Metzenbaun (D-Ohio) held a news conference in which they put all 100 senators’ names on Ping-Pong balls in a large drum and drew out five names-symbolic, they said, of the 5 percent of the senators who would lose health insurance coverage if only 95 percent of the population were insured.
The first name out of the gold-colored drum was Senate Finance Committee chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who has been instrumental in trying to craft a health-care plan. But his committee was unable to muster a majority for universal coverage and approved a plan that relies on insurance law changes and federal subsidies to the poor to achieve a target of 95 percent coverage by 2002.
It is that bill Mitchell is trying to reconcile with a Clinton-type universal-coverage, employer-mandate bill.
On Friday, bus caravans with health-care reform supporters are scheduled to depart from cities across the country and arrive in Washington in early August to build momentum for health legislation. Wellstone said the confusion over the Clinton statements has made some potential riders antsy.
“The people who are getting on the buses are starting to wonder what they are coming here for,” Wellstone said.
Arnold Bennett of Families USA, a pro-Clinton group which has been organizing the bus caravans, acknowledged that potential bus riders are worried, and that he had been fielding calls all day trying to reassure them.
“The president has not wavered, he’s absolutely deeply committed,” Bennett said. But he then sighed, “I wish he had not been so open and forthcoming with reality.”
White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said: “I think members of Congress should be reassured that the president’s bottom line has not changed.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen also made appearances Wednesday as part of the White House’s damage control effort.
It was reminiscent of past instances in which Clinton has either changed policy or shown “flexibility” that indicated he was changing policy, such as on Haiti or gays in the military or the middle-class tax cut.
He abandoned the tax cut, reduced his proposal to allow gays in the military without restriction to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” proposal that is now being challenged in the courts, and shifted his Haiti immigration policy several times.
