Clinton health care plan

In 1993, United States President Bill Clinton's administration proposed a significant health care reform package. Clinton had campaigned heavily on health care in the 1992 election, and quickly set up a task force, headed by First Lady Hillary Clinton, to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration's first-term agenda.

The result, announced by President Clinton in an address to Congress on September 22, 1993, was a complex proposal running more than 1,000 pages, the core element of which was a mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees through competitive but closely-regulated health maintenance organizations (HMOs). The plan was initially well-received by the public, press, and political leaders, and it seemed virtually certain to pass through the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Conservatives and the insurance industry, however, staged an effective and well-organized campaign opposing the plan, which they labeled "socialized medicine" and criticized as overly bureaucratic and restrictive of patient choice. The effort included extensive advertising designed to move public opinion, including the famous Harry and Louise ad, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan's allegedly bureaucratic nature. Meanwhile, Democrats, instead of uniting behind the President's original proposal, offered a number of competing plans of their own. Some criticized the plan from the left, preferring a Canadian-style single payer system.

On September 26, 1994, Senate majority leader George Mitchell announced that the plan was dead, at least for that session of Congress. The defeat weakened Clinton politically, and contributed to widespread public frustration with perceived Congressional gridlock. In the 1994 election, the Republican revolution gave the GOP control of both houses of Congress, dooming any prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive reform aimed at achieving universal coverage has not been seriously considered by Congress since.

External links

• "The Great Health Care Debate of 1993-1994" by Derek Bok in Public Talk
• "What Happened to Health Care Reform?" by Paul Starr in The American Prospect
• Timeline from PBS's The System