Well, sort of. “I think we can pass something that combines Chafee and Cooper-Breaux [the moderate Democrat plan] and doesn’t include any mandates,” Kerrey says. This is big news for two reasons. First, it represents a significant intellectual journey for the senator. Kerrey ran for president in 1992 pretty much as a single-issue candidate. The issue was health care, and he had invented a near-incomprehensible, neo-Canadian-style plan funded mostly by a 5 percent payroll tax. He could find only one other senator to cosponsor the scheme (more on that fellow in a moment); not many voters liked it, either. Since then, Kerrey has moved from the comprehensive to the comprehensible. He remains passionate about health-care reform. He wants to see a bill pass this year. But he believes the only way a bill can pass is with broad bipartisan support in the Senate-support Bill Clinton’s health plan won’t receive. More to the point, the other sponsor of Kerrey’s health-care scheme in 1992 seems to agree: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the committee (Senate Finance) that ultimately will decide the Clinton bill’s fate.
Which is the second reason Kerrey’s decision is significant. Moynihan and Kerrey are very close. It was widely believed that Kerrey wouldn’t have strayed from the Clinton-Rodham-Clinton-Magaziner reservation without his good friend’s OK. In fact, Moynihan has been trying to send the Clintons the word since January: health-care reform will not-and probably should not-pass by a narrow, partisan margin. As usual, Moynihan has history on his side. Every major piece of social legislation since Social Security has passed the Senate with at least 65 votes. “I can’t think of a bill this important that passed by only a vote or two,” says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “You may have some close votes along the way on amendments or procedure, but in the end, senators just don’t feel comfortable passing something this big unless everyone’s on board-you’ll either get 70 votes, or you’ll get 40.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan has won and lost at this game. In the early 1970s, after he served a stretch as Richard Nixon’s most creative domestic-policy adviser, two landmark pieces of social legislation-welfare reform (Moynihan’s Family Assistance Plan) and a health-care reform bill featuring universal coverage with an employer mandate (!)-were left to languish because a broad congressional consensus couldn’t be achieved (liberals led by Ted Kennedy didn’t consider them generous enough). Ten years later, Moynihan and Bob Dole broke a Senate logjam and achieved a broad consensus-91 percent support-for a monumental plan to save the Social Security system from bankruptcy by raising payroll taxes.
Clinton’s health-care initiative could go either way. There is strong potential support for a moderate approach, a bill that would reform the insurance industry, set a minimum benefits package, make it easier for individuals-especially the working poor-to afford coverage, but not require employers to provide it. This would be a real triumph for the president … but he’s been reluctant to take it. In fact, the White House-abetted by a handful of health-care zealots in the Congress has pushed a myopic and a historical approach, scratching about for the 51 votes that would “ram through” the Clinton bill, as Sen. Jay Rockefeller has put it, by a bare majority. This is silly on many grounds. it is now also irrelevant: even some White House nose-counters are saying the 51 votes simply do not exist.
Health-care debate can be (a) murky and (b) incredibly boring, but stick with me for the rest of this paragraph. The key issue here allegedly is “universal” coverage. The president insists on it. He will veto, he has said, any bill that doesn’t have it. But what is universal? Hawaii has universal coverage. It has, in fact, a plan very much like the one Clinton proposes. According to the Government Accounting Office, up to 7 percent of all Hawaiians still don’t have health insurance. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the dreaded, moderate Cooper-Breaux nonuniversal alternative could cover-91 percent of the people-without “mandates” of any sort-including anyone who loses a job, has a preexisting condition and most of those that need financial aid to afford health insurance. The difference between “universal” and non-: as little as 2 percent.
So what will happen now? Not much for the next few weeks. The House of Representatives won’t pass anything significant-especially not a Clinton-style bill with an employer mandate-until the Senate Finance Committee acts … because the House suspects, correctly, that the Finance Committee won’t approve an employer mandate (just as it didn’t approve Clinton’s BTU tax last year after the House did). The Finance Committee will hibernate for a month, while the chairman waits for Senators Mitchell and Rockefeller (and their White House allies) to accept the inevitable. If the president has any sense, he will stow his veto pen and encourage George Mitchell and Jay Rockefeller to get behind Cooper-Chafee-Kerrey-Moynihan, and accept this administration’s greatest triumph.
