Clinton and Gingrich, Once Foes, Find Common Ground on Health Care
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 22, 2005
WASHINGTON - Senator Clinton and one of those most responsible for torpedoing her health care reform plan in the early 1990s, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, sat side by side here yesterday, publicly sketching the outlines of new reforms that could win support from both ends of the political spectrum.
The 90-minute discussion was dubbed a "ceasefire on health care," but it seemed more a love-in for policy wonks than a truce.
The two former adversaries so reveled in their newly discovered common ground that a chorus of "Kumbaya" did not seem entirely out of the question.
"We have both come to some of the same conclusions on independent paths," Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, said. She described ideas about preventative medicine, health education, and better use of technology as issues "the great mushy middle of both parties could agree on."
Mr. Gingrich, a Republican, said he agreed, but quipped, "I'm not quite sure I'm ready to join the mushy middle."
In fact, as the two traded ideas, Mr. Gingrich, 62, sounded so conciliatory that it was hard to square with his history as a conservative firebrand whose fiscal showdown with President Clinton in 1995 caused repeated closures of the federal government.
Mr. Gingrich said yesterday the public's appetite for that sort of confrontation appears to be waning. "We may be at the end of a 40-year cycle of bitterness," he said. "I've spent enough of my life fighting. It'd be nice to spend some time constructing."
The moderator, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, John Breaux, said the title of the forum was a play on the old CNN program "Crossfire," which he noted was recently canceled.
The forum yesterday was the second joint appearance by the political odd couple in just over two months. In May, they appeared together at an event to promote legislation encouraging greater computerization in the health care system.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich both hailed a Senate committee's unanimous approval Wednesday of a bill aimed at making electronic health records universal and interchangeable. The former House speaker acknowledged that putting more health records online poses some privacy risks, but he insisted they are manageable.
Mr. Gingrich said a safeguard would be to punish the press for disclosing any private medical files. "I would make it an act of slander for the news media to publish medical records," he said.
Both politicians appeared to endorse proposals to require all individuals to have some form of health coverage. "We require people who drive cars to have automobile insurance in most states," Mrs. Clinton noted. She acknowledged that implementing a so-called "individual mandate" would be tough, because it might create incentives for employers to drop coverage.
Mr. Gingrich said free-market absolutists will have to give up the notion that working poor people can shoulder their own health care costs. "To ask people in the lowest paying jobs to pay the full burden of their health insurance is just irrational. It's not going to happen," he said.
The former speaker said insurance vouchers would be a good solution for the poor, and he insisted that such programs would not lead to a government takeover of the health care system. "When we invented food stamps, we did not invent government-owned grocery stores," said Mr. Gingrich, who left Congress in 1999 and founded a policy center that promotes health care innovation, the Center for Health Transformation.
He conceded that some of his adherents might be taken aback by his current views. "I risk not sounding as right wing as I should," Mr. Gingrich said.
Mrs. Clinton predicted that the impetus for further reform would come from American businesses that are becoming less competitive because of spiraling health costs. "The employment-based system is not sustainable in a global economy," the senator said. Employers with decent health insurance are being penalized, while some companies contribute little or nothing to the system. "There are a lot of employers basically getting a free ride," she said.
At one point, Mr. Breaux floated a suggestion that the tax deductibility of employer-provided health insurance be capped at some per capita amount, with additional revenues devoted to covering more uninsured Americans.
Mrs. Clinton was noncommittal on the idea, but Mr. Gingrich quickly dismissed it, at least as a first step. He said it was too close to the 1988 law that broadened Medicare coverage by increasing premiums on upper-income seniors. Some elderly howled in protest, and the law was repealed the next year.
"If you want to kill the whole debate, one of the ways to do it is to invoke the specter of sufficient pain," Mr. Gingrich said.
At times, the former speaker sounded a bit like the college history professor he once was. He made an obscure reference to Albert Camus and compared the growing obesity problem to "the rise of tuberculosis in urban industrial slums."
On several occasions, Mr. Breaux, Mr. Gingrich, and Mrs. Clinton referred to the pharmaceutical company that sponsored yesterday's event, Pfizer.
However, during yesterday's 90-minute session, no mention was made of the role prescription drug expenditures have played in the rapidly increasing cost of health care. |
