Experts at UCI Meeting Assail Congressman’s Health Plan : Insurance: They complain that alternative to Clinton proposal relies on voluntary participation and is too expensive.

The head of one of California’s largest health maintenance organizations on Thursday sternly criticized a Democratic congressman’s proposed health plan that is being promoted by hundreds of the nation’s most powerful business leaders.

A vote Wednesday by the Business Roundtable, composed of 225 heads of the largest U.S. corporations, thrust into the limelight a health care reform plan offered by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.).

While many members of the roundtable praised Cooper’s plan, which is less ambitious than the Clinton Administration’s proposal, it was not received well by many attending a health care conference Thursday at UC Irvine--including Dr. Robert Gumbiner, chairman of Fountain Valley-based FHP International Inc.

“There’s no doubt we need reform,” Gumbiner said. “But the Cooper plan just won’t work.”

The deep divisions that surfaced among business and health executives in Orange County over which health plan would best cure the ills of the nation’s health care system mirrors the debate that continues on Capitol Hill.

In the end, many health care experts said, the health care reform plan that does emerge at the end of the year will be unlike any being proposed in Washington today.

“Who knows what the final plan will be?” said David Anast, publisher of the Biomedical Market Newsletter in Costa Mesa. “All the plans have some merit. How they will be incorporated, no one knows.”

Though it embraces the Clinton idea of banding consumers together in large buying groups called purchasing alliances, the Cooper plan does not require employers to pay the majority of their workers’ health insurance premiums.

It would also make joining a health alliance voluntary, though it encourages universal health coverage.

The Business Roundtable endorsement of Cooper’s proposal has forced other executives to scramble to examine the effects of the new plan.

Several health experts, who had gathered at UCI’s third annual Health Care Forecast Conference, decried the Cooper plan, calling it expensive and unworkable.

Gumbiner and others said the Cooper plan fails because it is voluntary, and therefore unenforceable. It would also increase health premiums because fewer people would contribute to insurance funding pools than under the Administration’s proposal.

The alternative reform plan, they said, also would increase so-called cost shifting--a process that results when those who have no insurance use medical services at hospital emergency rooms, shifting the cost of their care to higher premiums for companies that provide employee insurance benefits and to individuals who pay for their own policies.

“An employer mandate is the only workable method,” said Dr. Melvyn Sterling, president of the Orange County Medical Assn. “I don’t know how you can” enforce health care reform “without that component.”

But others saw Cooper’s plan as a way to speed up health care reform, because the less-restrictive proposal seems to have strong bipartisan support.

Seal Beach-based Rockwell International Corp. and Irvine engineering firm Fluor Corp., both members of the Business Roundtable, called the Cooper plan a better alternative because it cuts the bureaucracy inherent in the Clinton plan.

“In general, we concur that there is no single program available today that will adequately address health-care reform,” said Debra Land, a spokeswoman for Fluor, whose chairman, Les McCraw, sits on the roundtable’s policy committee.

“However, the Cooper plan is a better starting point than the Clinton plan,” she said.

Rockwell spokeswoman Joy Sabol said the aviation, electronics and high-technology company also supports the new reform proposal. “We believe its principles are good.”

And Thomas Sutton, chairman of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Newport Beach, also thought the Cooper plan was superior to the White House proposal, but he criticized it for endorsing purchasing alliances.

“Small employers will no longer be able to negotiate and purchase coverage for their employees from a private insurer,” Sutton said.

Santa Ana nurse Wendy DeVreugd, who traveled last year to Washington and studied various reform plans, said her biggest concern is backing a proposal that places additional bureaucracy on an already complicated health system.

“I know what happens when government controls take over,” said DeVreugd, whose duties at a local hospital include juggling cases between doctors, patients, hospital administrators and insurance companies.

“We really need flexibility if we are going to get anything done,” she said.