COLUMN RIGHT/ JAMES P. PINKERTON : HMOs, DRGs and Dinosaurs in Washington : With grand schemes afoot, it pays to be humble.

“Jurassic Park” had the biggest box office opening in history. Tonight, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ira Magaziner and the surviving members of the health-care task force should bag their usual all-nighter and go see the movie. A trip to the cinema would remind them that the grand schemes of the best and the brightest have a way of not working out quite as planned. Whether you’re trying to hatch velociraptors or “managed competition,” there’s always something you didn’t think of. That’s why it pays to be humble. Unfortunately, humility is as scarce around the Old Executive Office Building as it was in Jurassic Park.

The plot of “Jurassic Park” is a familiar one: The scientist, powered by a mixture of madness and idealism, accidentally unleashes a great malevolent force. “Frankenstein,” “Alien,” even “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” all follow this theme.

There’s usually a skeptic whose job it is to shout, “Turn back before it’s too late!” Nobody listens, and so the story goes. Always hip to new angles, director Steven Spielberg’s Cassandra character is Jeff Goldblum, playing a mathematician tuned into the new discipline of “chaos theory.” What? Goldblum explains: “The essence of chaos is looking at the predictability of complex systems.”

Or unpredictability, as it turns out. Dinosaur cloning worked well in the test tube, but there was the little problem of the neo-saurs breeding in the wild, outside the control of their lab nannies. Then there was the bigger problem of the critters eating the visitors.

James Gleick’s bestseller, “Chaos: Making a New Science,” can be read as a 317-page cautionary tale: Don’t assume that things are as they seem, or will be as they were. Gleick contrasts the old optimism about “an ideal scientific world” with the new sobered awareness of “the disorder of experience.”

In politics as well as science, the problem of knowledge--in particular, the difficulty of knowing the future--makes it hard to play God.

Mike Horowitz, an official at the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan years, is a real-life Goldblum. Based on his own experience, Horowitz warns the Clintonians that they are headed toward . . . chaos. In a high-hopes effort to control Medicare costs, Magaziner’s Reaganite predecessors gave birth to “diagnostic related groups.” Washington would determine the reimbursement for every procedure. With careful monitoring, there could be no overcharging. DRGs sounded terrific--light at the end of the health-care cost tunnel. But within a month, Horowitz recalls, software packages called “DRG busters” appeared, enabling doctors and hospitals to redefine one ailment as many and bill the feds for all of them. Thus a tonsillectomy would become the operation itself plus a chest exam, sinus infection, etc. Realizing they were being rooked, the government came back with new rules to supersede the old rules. This made the health hustlers happy, because they could sell another generation of system-torquing software.

Horowitz, now observing the charge of Clinton’s wonk brigade from his office at the Manhattan Institute, describes the escalating spiral as “a legal-medical arms race.” Medicare spending quadrupled in the last 12 years. It may be hard to do worse than that, but the Clintonians are making the same mistake the Republicans made: trying to interpose the government into 250 million doctor-patient relationships. Nobody’s that smart.

That truism is about to be relearned at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Once again, it’ll be the Democrats who teach it. For example, there’s House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill). He’s an old-style pol, as eager to ladle from the pork barrel as anyone, but he brings the earthy perspective of a street guy to the utopian undertakings of the White House eggheads. Rostenkowski dismissed the Clinton initiative as “the domestic equivalent of ‘Star Wars,’ ” presuming “elaborate linkages between several different institutions, none of which exists here or anywhere else.” But other than that, the White House Wunderkinder might ask, how do you like our new plan?

To evolve, the health-care debate needs better thinking. The strands of this new intellectual DNA--choice, competition, empowerment--are being woven together into a new life form: new-ideas Republicans. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) are pushing IRA-type plans for health care, so that patients, not DRGs, would run the system. Right now, Coats and Stearns are just furry little creatures trying to avoid being stepped on by the Washington thunder lizards, but look out--this new breed has bigger brains.