‘Jackson Hole Group’ Helps to Shape Bush Health Plan : Policy: A small circle of doctors, academics and executives exerts a strong influence on the White House.

As the Bush Administration fine-tunes its health care reform proposals, a small publicity-shy coterie of doctors, academics and senior health care executives--known as “the Jackson Hole Group”--has been exerting a strong influence on White House thinking.

They are one of several free market-oriented groups that are trying to influence the health care proposals that President Bush is expected to unveil in his State of the Union address Jan. 28.

But the absence of consumer interests and other viewpoints in the Jackson Hole Group--which typically meets in the vacation home of its leader near the Grand Tetons in Wyoming--is drawing criticism even as its key tenets are being embraced by the White House.

The Administration’s health care proposals are expected to include tax credits to help individuals buy insurance, a first-ever tax on some workers’ health care benefits and changes in federal law to make it easier for small businesses to provide coverage to employees.

Many of the Jackson Hole Group’s ideas--thrashed out in meetings that have included top Administration officials and advisers--are not entirely original, and some have been around for years.

“But if there’s a group that’s been important in terms of thinking through the issues intellectually, it’s the Jackson Hole Group,” said Kevin Moley, a key Administration health planner. “The views they’ve expressed and the principles they’ve articulated are important components that drove the discussions.”

Moley, assistant secretary of health and human services for management and budget, is among the Administration officials or advisers who have met with the group. Others include Dr. William L. Roper, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control, and Washington attorney Deborah Steelman, a key Bush campaign aide in 1988.

“They (Administration advisers) mostly come to listen and ask questions,” said William Link, executive vice president of the Prudential Insurance Co. and a Jackson Hole member.

The group’s leader is Paul M. Ellwood, a Minnesota physician who heads InterStudy, a nonprofit policy research group that began promoting health maintenance organizations in the 1960s.

“What I tried to do was pull together the most knowledgeable and powerful set of people in health care in the United States, said Ellwood. “I made a list of 20 people whom I had the greatest respect for. If any group could make things happen, they could.”

More recently, Ellwood and the group’s co-founder, Stanford economist Alain C. Enthoven, have moved to broaden its informal membership, reaching out to organizations such as the Washington Business Group on Health, a coalition of large businesses seeking reform.

But that has not satisfied critics. “One of the problems of the whole debate is that when people get together, it’s the usual suspects--those with the most stake in the current system,” fumed Robert Brandon, vice president of Citizen Action, a nationwide grass-roots organization that wants a national health insurance system.

Given Jackson Hole’s blue chip membership, including the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Assn. and the Oakland-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc., it was inevitable that the group would end up recommending market-oriented approaches--those that favor private-sector solutions and discourage government regulation--that many leading Democrats regard as insufficient, Brandon and other critics said.

“But we’re not trying to do anything but to enrich the debate,” countered Jackson Hole member David Lawrence, Kaiser’s president and chief executive officer.

One reason that the group’s ideas are receiving such a warm reception at the White House may be that “the Administration is focused on incremental types of reforms and the Jackson Hole Group for the most part are supporters of incremental reform,” said Dr. Jacque J. Sokolov, vice president and medical director of Southern California Edison.

In any case, the Jackson Hole Group, which will meet again next month, is hardly alone in exerting some influence on the Bush Administration.

A working group headed by Steelman has studied the issue and conducted hearings around the country for two years and recently forwarded its recommendations to the White House. Louis W. Sullivan, secretary of health and human services, has been sounding out a variety of interest groups on the issue.

“We’ve dealt closely with the Administration, really, for the last two years,” said Stuart M. Butler, a Heritage Foundation analyst and advocate of granting individuals refundable tax credits.

More recently, as the issue of health care reform has moved to the front of the national agenda, numerous groups and corporations have been invited to the White House to outline how they are managing to slow health spending or expand medical coverage to the uninsured.

Times staff writer Robert A. Rosenblatt contributed to this story.