Profs say health plan seeks coverage for all

"Womb to tomb" coverage, some University faculty members say, is the one point President Clinton is dead-set on with regard to his plan for health care reform. Clinton dedicated a large part of his State of the Union Address Tuesday to health care reform, an issue that has lain virtually dormant since its unveiling last fall. While he failed to put forth any new ideas, faculty members say Clinton made his main concerns explicit. "I don't think he said anything new," Medicine and Health Care Management Professor Sanford Schwartz said yesterday. "He said quite clearly that the linchpin of all this is universal coverage for all Americans. He made it clear that he would not accept any plan that [did not include universal coverage]." Undergraduate Nursing Dean Mary Naylor agreed, saying that the speech "drew the line" between what Clinton would accept in a plan and what he would not. "What is clear now is what he considers the fundamental core [of his plan]," Naylor said. Naylor and Schwartz both pinpointed the main objective of Clinton's address as creating a sense of crisis in the nation with regard to the health care system. "The way to create such a significant social change in this country is to create a sense of crisis," Schwartz said. "The way to avoid [social change] is to prove there are serious problems, but no crisis." Clinton's critics, including Senate Finance Committee Chairperson Daniel Patrick Moynihan, maintain that a health care crisis does not exist. Mark Pauly, director of the Health Care Systems Department in the Wharton School of Business, said although there are "many bad problems" which should be dealt with, the system as a whole is not "going from bad to worse." Steady change, and not a complete overhaul as Clinton would like, will likely result if the American people cannot be convinced of a crisis situation, Naylor said. "There is a need not for incremental change, but for real fundamental change in the way we deliver services and finance them," she said. Schwartz said Clinton's opponents will stress what is good about the current system, and call for a "more measured, phased-in approach" to deal with the issues that need reform. Tuesday's speech, he added, was meant to enter the issue into its "political phase" and to begin to sell it the the American public. "They have moved from the realm of theory and design into the realm of politics," he said. " I think they know what they'd like to do but they know they're not going to get it all." The debate this spring, Naylor said, will be about compromise and trade-offs so that implementation will eventually be possible. "[Clinton] would like to have some kind of consensus this year," Naylor said. "We'll see a real grass roots effort to get the public informed and [to find out what the American people think.]"

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