A New Chance Lies Ahead for Universal Health Care

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.