Hillary to require health insurance for all

[Herman Munster]

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-ushill0916,0,663698.story?coll=ny_home_rail_headlines

The long-anticipated initiative has much in common with the Obama and Edwards proposals. All three plans allow individuals to choose among a wide array of private insurance plans, all would create massive "purchasing pools" of patients to drive down costs to individuals and all would prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses.

Edwards, Obama and Clinton would also pump hundreds of millions into additional funding for wellness programs, fighting chronic illnesses, improving mental health services, combating obesity and expanding free health care to more poor and working-class children.

"She first made a lot of these proposals in 1993 and they were regarded as revolutionary," said Carol McDaid, a longtime health care industry lobbyist. "Now it doesn't seem so revolutionary, it's in the mainstream."

Clinton's new proposal represents a stylistic shift from her 1993 effort than a major policy change. Back in the heady early days of the Clinton administration, she oversaw a massive Manhattan Project-style planning effort with obsessive attention to secrecy, a zeal that bordered on hubris and an obliviousness to political reality that made enemies of powerful .Democratic leaders.

One former insurance company executive recalled Clinton summoning top drug company executives to the White House for a dressing-down. "She storms into the meeting and 'The days of profiteering in the pharmaceutical industry are over!'" the lobbyist recalled. "There were no handshakes, no 'How was your flight' ... It was ugly, nasty. From that point on I knew her plan was dead."