Wilson Overstated Health Plan on Talk Show, Critics Say

Gov. Pete Wilson, in a national television interview this week, seemed to get carried away in a one-upmanship game with President Clinton on health reform, saying that a system comparable to the universal insurance plan being prepared by Clinton is already in place in California.

“We have got a system that sounds much like the Clinton plan, except that it’s voluntary,” Wilson boasted on the “Larry King Live” show Tuesday in a segment devoted to Clinton’s speech on health reform to the National Governors’ Assn. in Tulsa, Okla, the day before.

Those and other comments drew criticism from observers of the California health insurance scene Wednesday, although Wilson refused to back down in comments to reporters in Sacramento.

“He’s wrong, just wrong,” said state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, who is planning to run for the Democratic nomination for governor next year to oppose Wilson. “If this were a test, I would have to give him a grade of F.”

Talking on the King show about the desirability of the voluntary approach Wilson favors, as opposed to a program favored by Clinton that would make it mandatory for employers to provide health insurance for their employees, Wilson said:

“All the things the President talked about--the guaranteed issue and renewal, without reference to pre-existing health condition; the portability, so that your insurance follows you when you change jobs; the reduction in the premiums that makes it affordable; all the benefits of managed competition--all these things are possible in a voluntary plan, and, in fact, that’s what’s happening in California,” Wilson said.

Garamendi responded: “If all those things were happening, you are going to have a lot of people in California wondering why they don’t have health care.”

Maryann O’Sullivan, director of San Francisco-based Health Access, a nonprofit group that is lobbying for universal health coverage, called the program Wilson was talking about, which began just 45 days ago, “less than a drop in the bucket.”

There have been three state health insurance programs started to bring insurance to the estimated 6 million Californians who lack coverage. To date, those programs have enrolled only about 38,000 people, the Wilson Administration conceded Wednesday.

O’Sullivan said the biggest differences between the Wilson and Clinton approaches is that the state plan aimed at businesses “doesn’t say that employers have to provide benefits, which is what the President is going to say, and it doesn’t do anything to control the costs of health care, another one of the President’s goals.”

One of the three new state programs, called Access for Infants and Mothers, provides health insurance to unwed pregnant women who do not qualify for Medi-Cal; it has 16,000 enrollees. Another, the Major Risk Medical Insurance Program, provides insurance to people who have money but cannot get coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

The most ambitious of the three programs, and the one Wilson seemed to be taking about in his comments, is called the Health Insurance Plan of California (HIPC); it established an insurance pool that small-business owners with five to 50 employees can join.

Wilson, at a Capitol news conference, was asked if he might have given the erroneous impression during a Larry King radio talk show Tuesday that California had solved all of its health care problems.

“No, I did not,” Wilson replied. “We have not solved all of them. We just happen to be ahead of everybody else.”

Times staff writer Jerry Gillam contributed to this story from Sacramento.