A new chance lies ahead for universal health care

Harris Wofford

was a Democratic U.S. senator for Pennsylvania

from 1991 to 1995

If voters elect a Democrat next fall, this country will have a new chance to secure universal health coverage. Let's not make it a rerun of the 1994 debacle.

Those of us who joined the struggle to achieve that goal in the early 1990s must hope that this time we succeed. The story of that effort is a cautionary tale, worth recalling, in order to prevent the unhappy past from becoming a prologue.

In 1991, after an uphill campaign in which health care was a central issue, I rode into the Senate carrying the banner of health care for all - health care as good as members of Congress or millions of federal employees had. I was committed to the effort launched by President Bill Clinton and led vigorously, but unsuccessfully, by first lady Hillary Clinton.

In the Senate, I worked closely with colleagues to secure passage of a bill encompassing most of what the president proposed. The plan was comprehensive and complex. To most people it was confusing; to many members of Congress it seemed too prescriptive. The plan soon became the target of health-care industry ads (remember "Harry and Louise") and of those seeking to bring down the Clinton administration.

After we lost our Senate majority, the health-care banner was in tatters. "Hillary Care" became a partisan epithet. That was unfair: The bitter partisanship of those years may have doomed

anything

as big and controversial as health-care reform. Still, that failure is a key part of her experience, her major responsibility during Clinton's presidency.

That failure was one of the main reasons for the Republican sweep of 1994, when Rick Santorum and the voters "retired" me from the Senate and Republicans took control of both houses of Congress. Their most telling claim was that the Democrats had failed a crucial test of leadership. Had we managed to enact even one good first step, such as the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), it might well have staved off the Republican takeover that so dramatically changed the national agenda.

Naturally, those of us who went down with the Clinton health-care plan follow the current debates with special interest.

What the country doesn't need in the present campaign is further bickering over the details of the three Democrats' proposed health-care plans. It's beginning to sound like a game of "my plan is bigger and better than yours." We are so close to agreement on the basic approach for a new Democratic administration that it's no time to dwell on nuanced difference.

What's good is that all of the Democratic proposals are designed to reach the goal of universal coverage. The key questions are: Who is

least

encumbered by the legacy from past disputes? Who will be most effective at searching for common ground? Who can inspire, unite and galvanize the nation to reach the finish line of affordable and high-quality health care for all Americans?

Measuring the two leading Democratic candidates, one ought to wonder whether the Hillary Clinton of today (especially in light of her acrimonious campaign style in the current primaries) can overcome the still-untamed partisanship loose in the land better than she did in 1994. She says she has learned the lesson of that fiasco 14 years ago. But already we are hearing worrisome echoes of the old approach in her campaign's insistence that everyone, like it or not, must be required to acquire health insurance, and that no plan is acceptable that does not mandate it.

Could she, this time, bring Congress and the nation together to find common ground needed for action? As a battle-scarred veteran of health-care reform, I would not roll the dice today with that expectation.

I consider Sen. Barack Obama's health-care proposals the most workable way to get us to universal coverage. Even more, I believe he has the best chance to reach a consensus that can succeed. Not since John and Robert Kennedy have I seen the kind of response Obama is stirring around the country to his call for national unity, from Democrats and Republicans and the largest party of all, the non-party people.

He is a gifted and natural consensus-builder, tempered not just in state and federal legislatures, but also in the bare-knuckle politics of the Chicago neighborhoods where he worked as a community organizer. He is touching something deep in the American spirit. That's what it will take to bring out the better angels of our nature and secure the right - the moral right - to health care for all Americans.