Health Insurers and White House Aides Confer

Top White House officials met Monday with representatives of the Health Insurance Assn. of America, among the harshest critics of the President’s health care reform agenda, in a search for common ground.

The 90-minute meeting, arranged by Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, may herald something of a detente between the Clinton Administration and the insurance organization. The association represents most of the nation’s smaller insurance companies and has already poured nearly $10 million into an advertising campaign critical of health care reform that has infuriated the White House.

The meeting also was widely seen by analysts as part of an accelerated White House effort to reach out amid new signs that there may be less business support for the President’s reforms than the White House had assumed.

In a recent round of meetings with chiefs of corporations the White House had thought were supportive, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton instead was told about their serious reservations, informed sources said.

“The White House clearly is beginning to reach out in a way that it had not before,” said onetime Clinton adviser Bruce Fried, now an independent analyst and health care lobbyist. “These discussions with the insurance and business communities seem to indicate a renewed effort by the Administration to find a consensus among the major interests in the health care debate.”

A senior presidential assistant Monday put little stock in the expressions of doubt by the business leaders, ascribing their motives to posturing for bargaining leverage.

The aide also downplayed the meeting, which included former Willis D. Gradison Jr., a former congressman who heads the insurance association, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes and senior Clinton advisers Ira Magaziner and George Stephanopoulos.

“It was really just an attempt to begin to understand each other,” the aide said, noting that Gradison and Magaziner met several times in 1993, although have not since the summer.

Monday’s meeting raised eyebrows because the Administration and the insurance association were bitterly at odds throughout Clinton’s first year in office.

Last fall, the association aired a series of television ads featuring a couple who attacked what they called excessive big government, restrictions on consumer choices of physicians and caps on insurance premiums under Clinton’s plan.