Clinton Sees Health Plan Attracting Rural Doctors

President Clinton pitched his health care plan Tuesday as a cure for doctor shortages in rural America and said he would continue to sell it outside Washington to keep it from getting “lost in a cloud of hot air.”

Warming up for an evening town hall televised live in nine states, Clinton spent the day promoting his health reform ideas to doctors, administrators and patients of an understaffed and financially burdened rural hospital.

His TV forum was the first of three this week. The President and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton are trying to generate public demand for health care change as Congress wraps up an Easter recess and prepares to resume work on the issue.

“What I’m trying to do is get out here and highlight these real world experiences of the doctors and nurses and all the health care providers here so that we can focus the attention of the American people and the Congress on solutions to the real problems and not the rhetorical problems,” the President told reporters.

He acknowledged support for his plan has wavered in the polls, and he blamed that on well-financed opposition from insurers and partisan attacks from Republicans. But he offered this optimistic status report: “The debate is in a funny way just beginning. . . . I think we are winning it again and we are getting real movement in Congress.”

Tailoring his latest pitch to his rural audience in Troy, 50 miles east of Charlotte, Clinton shook his head as local family practitioner Deborah McRoberts told him she often works more than 100 hours a week and has more than 8,000 patients--more than four times the recommended doctor-patient ratio.

Little noticed in the intense debate over health reform, Clinton said, are provisions in his plan to attract more doctors, nurses and other health professionals to rural areas, such as Troy.

Clinton said his plan would provide $12,000 annual tax credits to doctors who agreed to work in areas certified as short of doctors, and $6,000 in credits for nurses and other health providers needed in such areas.

Also, he said it would add 7,000 new doctors to the National Health Service Corps, a program that pays medical school debts of doctors who agree to serve rural and other areas in need.

And Clinton said his plan would alleviate the shortage of general practitioners by requiring medical schools that get federal subsidies to shift their emphasis away from training specialists and back to turning out more family doctors.

After a tour and roundtable discussion at Montgomery Memorial Hospital, Clinton offered a methodical presentation of his health plan to about 200 local residents, using half a dozen charts to highlight major details of his plan.