First Lady Pushes for Health Care Reform in Visit to L.A. : Insurance: She says her goal is to ensure access to basic benefits for all. Her anecdotes touch an emotional chord.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton visited South-Central Los Angeles on Monday to seek support for national health care reform, telling an audience of several hundred medical students and hospital workers “that we have too many people without access to even basic care.”

“In our country, we have probably the finest health care available in the world--if you can afford it,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

Later, she touched an emotional chord with an audience at a benefit luncheon in Beverly Hills with personal anecdotes that she said had stiffened her resolve to push for an overhaul of the health system.

At both stops, Mrs. Clinton, who chairs the White House Task Force on National Health Care Reform, spoke sometimes with an angry edge as she addressed shortcomings in the health care system.

During a morning speech to about 300 students, faculty members and health care workers at Drew, Mrs. Clinton lamented those “shut out of the system” by the lack of medical insurance and hospitals that “are overworked to the point of breaking.”

Later, in a luncheon speech at the Regent Beverly Wilshire to raise money for the UCLA Medical Center’s Iris Cantor Center for Breast Imaging, Mrs. Clinton emphasized health issues facing women.

She told the story of a friend who battled breast cancer. “One of the last things she did was to bring her husband and her young son to the White House because she wanted her son to meet the President,” she said. As they were leaving, the First Lady said her friend, then in a wheelchair, turned to the Clintons and said: “ ‘Don’t ever let anyone forget what this disease does to those who are left behind.’ I told her then that I would not. . . . I intend to fulfill my commitment.”

Mrs. Clinton also recounted the story of a woman she met in New Orleans. She said the woman, who did not have health insurance, had been to a doctor who did a manual examination of her breasts and sent her to a surgeon after finding a suspicious lump.

“The surgeon examined her and told her that if she had insurance he would biopsy the lump in her breast, but since she did not have insurance, he would just watch it. . . . I think many of you can feel what I felt when I heard that woman say that,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Can you imagine what it is like for that woman to get up every day and wonder whether she is living with cancer and not knowing it?”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton said it was her first visit to Los Angeles without the President since the inauguration. Mrs. Clinton, who arrived Sunday evening, had planned to stay until Wednesday, but her staff said she now plans to leave today for Little Rock, the Clintons’ hometown.

Mrs. Clinton’s speeches offered few specifics about the health care reform plan she is working on with other members of the task force.

The plan is still being drafted and debated within the White House. Earlier plans called for the package to be unveiled in May, but the date of release has been steadily pushed back. The word from the White House now is that the plan will not be released until September at the earliest. Key issues to be resolved include how the universal insurance plan would be paid for and how quickly it would be implemented.

Mrs. Clinton said at both stops on Monday that the goal is to provide affordable health insurance to all Americans.

Mrs. Clinton told the crowd gathered on the lawn outside the Drew facility: “In today’s world, there is nobody here in this audience who will really be able to say with any certainty that you will be insured yourself next year.”

Sounding much like a candidate for office, she said her goal was to come up with a plan so that “no one ever needs to be afraid again that they will not have access to quality health care.”

Just before the speech, Mrs. Clinton toured a laboratory at the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, which is across the street from the medical school.

In the medical center, the First Lady peered through a microscope at lab experiments and chatted with children in science and health classes set up to encourage elementary school-age minority students to consider careers in medicine.

Mrs. Clinton was guided through the medical center by Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, president of Drew. Tuckson is a member of Mrs. Clinton’s task force and an advocate of early childhood education programs to introduce inner-city children to science and medicine.

Tuckson said he believed that Mrs. Clinton struck a responsive chord with the audience because she seemed to understand the problems the health care workers faced, as well as the difficulties of the poor and uninsured in getting medical care.

The physician said people without insurance often wait too long before seeking medical care, and then it sometimes is too late. “We feel a sense of frustration when people come to us with a disease that is far advanced because it is not diagnosed early. She seems to understand that so well,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton told the luncheon audience in Beverly Hills that the reforms she is seeking “will provide security for every American.”

She said the insurance she envisions would provide a package of benefits “that emphasizes primary and preventive health care.”

“We have done it backward for too long. We have paid for the surgery, but not for the mammography,” she said.

The First Lady said she wants an insurance plan that, unlike many current plans, would pay for checkups, immunizations, Pap tests and other early detection and prevention treatments that she argued “will save us money as well as save us lives.”

She added: “We want the decisions about health care to be made by physicians, nurses, health care professionals--not government and insurance bureaucrats,” she said.

UCLA Medical Center officials said Mrs. Clinton’s luncheon raised $400,000 for the breast imaging center.