Bentsen Asked First Lady for Health Figures : White House: Treasury secretary, shying from support for reform plan, skirted task force. Action points to friction between policy and economic staffs.

Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen told First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in early October that he was reluctant to testify in support of the Administration’s health care plan until White House health care officials released crucial information to the Treasury Department for review, Bentsen told The Times in an interview.

Bentsen said that Mrs. Clinton, who is in charge of health care policy for the Administration, quickly agreed. The material, including the draft of the health care legislation to be sent to Congress, arrived at the Treasury Department the next day, allowing the department’s economists and analysts to begin developing more accurate cost estimates than previously were available.

In going to Mrs. Clinton directly, Bentsen circumvented the health care task force and senior White House health care adviser Ira Magaziner. Although senior Administration officials have sought to downplay the significance of Bentsen’s maneuver, his action appears to offer a revealing glimpse inside the long-simmering struggle for influence over the health care plan between the Administration’s economic advisers and their health care counterparts, led by Magaziner.

Some senior Administration officials said that reports of tension between the Administration’s health care and economic advisers over how to pay for the plan have been exaggerated by the media. Some acknowledge that such frictions did cause problems earlier, yet they stressed that senior economic advisers now feel more comfortable with the plan, especially since they have pushed for and won significant changes in recent weeks.

Officials said that, by the time Bentsen talked to Mrs. Clinton in early October, Treasury had received tentative cost estimate data but had not seen the final draft of the legislation, which Treasury officials needed to determine whether their earlier economic and cost assumptions were accurate.

“One of the reasons I refused to go to (Capitol) Hill and testify was that we had not had a chance to look at the numbers to my satisfaction,” Bentsen said. “And so I went to the First Lady.”

With new cost estimates finally available, Bentsen last week agreed to testify. Until then, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman largely had been handling the issue.

Yet even now, Bentsen, the Administration’s chief spokesman on economic matters, seemed hesitant in an interview to offer more than a mild endorsement for the plan. He said merely that the plan is the “best effort of a lot of people.”

Bentsen was also reluctant to place blame for the delay in providing the information needed by the Treasury. “I did not know the reason why we had not received the information,” Bentsen said. “For whatever reason, we had not received it.”

Bentsen aides, apparently worried that reports of his reluctance to testify could make it seem that Bentsen was rebelling against the Administration’s plan, sought to dismiss the incident. “I think it was just the result of a lot of people working incredibly long hours, and getting too busy,” said one.

The Administration is clearly sensitive to reports of internal conflict between its economic and health care advisers, especially since most of the criticism of the Clinton plan has focused on how the Administration plans to pay for it.

“I think what we had was a very interactive process, and on different issues there were different views, and it was not always the economic people against the health care people,” observed one senior White House adviser. “We had a lot of people at the table, and the consequence was that we wound up with a better product.”

Yet some economic policy-makers have complained that Magaziner, working out of the White House, had operated in a secretive manner for months and was often reluctant to share information with other departments in an apparent effort to control the health care debate within the Administration.

“What was happening was that one person was trying to keep the whole plan in his head,” noted one Administration official. And Magaziner occasionally would become irked when economic advisers would raise questions about the plan in private meetings.

For example, sources said that when Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who heads the Council of Economic Advisers, asked in one meeting about the health plan’s effect on job creation, Magaziner became upset that she had raised the issue in front of other officials without checking with him first.

“I have no doubts there were discontents from time to time, and I have no doubts we offended people from time to time,” Magaziner said in an interview. “But I think we were trying to do the best we could in good faith.”

The plan has been significantly altered in recent weeks at the prompting of the Administration’s economic advisers, who were concerned over whether Magaziner had developed a realistic mechanism to pay for the plan.

Bentsen said, for instance, that he insisted late in the decision-making process that the plan include limits on subsidies for small businesses and low-income workers. He also said that he had asked that the final cost estimates sent to Congress include a 15% reserve, or margin of error, just in case the Administration’s forecasts are wrong. “The President readily agreed with me on that,” Bentsen said.

The economic group managed to move the plan somewhat, said one senior White House official. But “more importantly, I think we managed to make people understand that it will have to move more” once it gets to Congress. “I think Ira understands that.”

It has only been since senior economic policy-makers have weighed in on the health care plan and the Treasury and Office of Management and Budget and other agencies have begun to “scrub” the cost estimates, that many officials in the Clinton Administration--ranging from Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich to Bentsen, Tyson and National Economic Adviser Robert E. Rubin--have felt confident in speaking out in favor of the proposal.

“I feel much more comfortable with the plan than I did two or three months ago,” noted one Cabinet member.