GOP Calls for Bipartisan Health Reform : Legislation: Party chairman, two senators signal willingness to work with President to provide universal care. They oppose current plan.

On a day marked by bipartisan support for a new trade agreement, Republican leaders said Wednesday that the GOP is ready to work with Democrats to pass legislation that will provide for universal health care, another primary goal of President Clinton.

But while Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour said that “there can be bipartisan health care reform,” he stressed that Republicans oppose the recently introduced Clinton legislation and consider it “a government-run health care system financed by a gigantic payroll tax that’s going to hurt the economy and cost millions of jobs.”

Both the President and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who headed the task force that shaped the health care legislation, have met repeatedly with Republicans seeking bipartisan support for reform. They have emphasized that they are willing to compromise on all aspects of the bill except universal coverage.

Barbour and two fellow Mississippians who hold GOP leadership positions--Sen. Thad Cochran, the Republican Conference chairman, and Sen. Trent Lott, secretary of the conference--were interviewed at a breakfast with The Times Washington Bureau. They pointed out that Republicans also have introduced health care initiatives. If reform legislation is to pass, there must be compromises all around, they said.

“We’ll have to negotiate, we’ll have to have compromises,” Barbour said.

Cochran credited Clinton with showing leadership on the issue and being “the first President in a long time that’s spent so much time and effort and attention to the health care reform issue.” But Cochran and Lott both suggested that the more Americans know about Clinton’s plan and the Republican proposals, the more they will favor the GOP approach.

If the Clintons “are willing to negotiate and work the problems out,” Lott said, “I think the net result is probably there will be, in the next year or year and a half, some positive health care reform.”

All three party officials spoke guardedly about the prospects for more bipartisan efforts in Congress in the wake of the battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Before the effort on the trade issue, bitter partisan fights killed the President’s economic stimulus program and almost doomed a Clinton budget that the Democrat-controlled Congress finally passed with no Republican support.

Barbour, a one-time political adviser in the Ronald Reagan White House who is known as highly partisan, said that, while Republicans will work with Clinton to achieve health care reform and will “support him when he’s right, very few times has he offered us the opportunity.”

More sharp partisan fights are likely to erupt early next year when the Administration is expected to introduce new legislation, including additional gun control measures, aimed at curbing violent crimes.

The GOP leaders made it clear that they and a majority of Republicans will oppose any additional federal gun controls. Later Wednesday, Cochran and Lott joined 32 other Republicans and nine Democrats in voting against a provision in the Clinton anti-crime bill that bans 19 types of military-style automatic weapons. The Senate passed the measure, 56 to 43.

Barbour declared that Republicans will support legislation at the state level to ban gun ownership by teen-agers.

Barbour said that crime will be a major issue in the 1994 congressional elections and will work in the Republicans’ favor. He and the senators spoke optimistically about a resurgent Republican Party in the aftermath of elections this year in which the GOP scored major victories, including the election of governors in Virginia and New Jersey, senators in Georgia and Texas, and mayors in New York and Los Angeles.

Cochran, who will play a major role in the Senate contests, said that the GOP has “a wonderful opportunity” to increase its numbers in the Senate, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans, 56 to 44. He and Lott said that the party has good chances of winning seats being vacated by Democrats in Arizona, Michigan and Ohio and another seat in Tennessee that Al Gore held until he was elected vice president.

The GOP leaders pointed out that their home state of Mississippi was virtually solid Democratic until the 1960s, when the state Democratic Party split over the racial issue as many blacks turned to the newly created Freedom Democratic Party. Barbour remembered a 1968 poll showing only 6% of state voters were Republicans. Now Mississippi is a Republican stronghold.

Today, Cochran said, Mississippi has joined Utah as one of two states where both senators, the governor and lieutenant governor are Republicans. In addition, many local officials are now Republican and the three GOP leaders said an overwhelming number of young Mississippi voters are Republican.

Although the Mississippi Republican Party is virtually all white, Cochran said, “it’s not because we don’t want black voters to support our candidates and be involved in the party. Because we’re engaged in a very aggressive outreach and affirmative program to try to get more black Mississippians involved in the Republican Party.”