For a guy credited with phenomenal political instincts, Clinton behaved in a puzzling way for sure at the time of that national health care fiasco. The cynical (perhaps accurate) view would be that Clinton had no serious interesting in overhauling the national health care system, that he was been an industry tool right along. But giving him the benefit of the doubt here and assuming a real overhaul was his intention, there is no question he botched the job.
Clinton had the GOP on the defensive when he gave his State of the Union address and waved that prototype National Health Care Card in Congress's face. But he didn't follow through in a sensible way. In essence, he let Hillary and Ira Magaziner go off and confer with the health care industry -- of all parties -- on what it thought should be the way to proceed with reform. Instead, Clinton should have told Congress that he'd contacted every country in the world with a single-payer system and asked that they fax him key points on how their systems work; he then should have given Congress a six-month deadline for drafting legislation creating a single-payer system using the best (as decided in debate) features of other countries' systems. It's hard to see how that course of action would have produced an outcome more disastrous than what did occur, i.e.: Clinton lost all momentum for reform, gave the GOP and health care industry time to regroup, was made (along with Hillary) to look ridiculous and helped spur the expansion of managed care as still another profiteering segment of the health care industry for the public to loathe.
Carl _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
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