New Health Reform Compromise Hinted : Legislation: Treasury secretary says plan’s phase-in could be prolonged, and benefits package cut. Clinton’s core elements would remain.

In perhaps a new signal of White House willingness to compromise on health care reform, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said Thursday that Congress might well prolong the full implementation period and even scale back the proposed standard benefits package.

But Bentsen also indicated that the Clinton Administration intends to stand by the three central elements of the President’s proposal: mandatory work-based coverage, large consumer-based purchasing pools and caps on insurance premiums.

The Treasury secretary declined, however, to elaborate on possible areas of compromise.

“I’m not going to do horse-trading with the committees here,” Bentsen told health care reporters invited to the White House. “There’s no question that there will be adjustments made by the committees.”

But Bentsen also predicted that the final legislation “will have . . . the basic things that the Administration has proposed.”

It was Bentsen who revealed in January the President’s intention to compromise on a key issue. In a speech to business leaders the morning after Clinton’s State of the Union Address, Bentsen said that the Administration was prepared to consider allowing many more corporations to opt out of the proposed insurance-buying alliances. Companies in the alliances would be able to pool their insurance-buying power to get lower premium rates for employees.

Bentsen’s comments Thursday came during a frenetic day of posturing by various interest groups with a major stake in health care reform.

As the Treasury secretary was speaking to reporters, the National Federation of Independent Business--one of the Administration’s chief foes on health reform--released a report predicting a job loss of between 850,000 and 4 million if employers are required to provide coverage for their workers.

Bentsen disputed those numbers, saying: “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think there’ll be some shifting of jobs, but not a net job loss.”

Also on Thursday, three dozen corporations and health, labor and senior groups sent letters to Congress urging it to support the employer mandate, which would require businesses to pay at least 80% of a worker’s health insurance premiums, with individuals paying the rest.

Under Clinton’s proposal, firms would pay as much as 7.9% of their payrolls for health premiums.

The organizations that signed the letter called the mandate “the most practical and realistic approach” to universal coverage. They included the American Assn. of Retired Persons, Chrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co., the corporate parent of American Airlines, Archer Daniels Midland Co., Bethlehem Steel Co., USX Corp., the American Hospital Assn., the Catholic Health Assn., Safeway Inc., and the Assn. of Private Pension and Welfare Plans, which represents many Fortune 500 firms.

No provision in Clinton’s 1,342-page Health Security Act has drawn as much opposition as the employer mandate.

The President and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton have said repeatedly that there is no other way to achieve universal coverage short of a broad-based tax or a requirement that individuals carry insurance--both unacceptable to the White House.

Clinton wants to extend coverage to the estimated 38 million uninsured Americans by 1998. Bentsen declined Thursday to say whether the President is willing to delay that date, replying to a question about phasing-in of the mandate: “Obviously the shorter the better, from our standpoint.”

Critics of the mandate, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Assn. of Manufacturers, have warned that it would impose a crushing burden on small entrepreneurs and deter business start-ups.

Studies on the job impact of an employer mandate have yielded wildly conflicting results, ranging from the independent business group’s latest projection of 4 million lost jobs to claims of a job gain of 660,000.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office continued its economic analysis of the Clinton plan’s leading rival, which was authored by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). Cooper’s bill hews more closely to the theory of “managed competition,” which holds that competition can be increased in the health care system by banding consumers into large purchasing cooperatives.

Budget office Director Robert Reischauer had said earlier that he expects the Cooper bill to increase the deficit more than the Clinton plan because it does not rely on government-imposed price controls. Cooper and his allies said that the budget office is not giving credit to the market forces that would be unleashed by his plan--which already are working in some states to hold down medical costs.

The budget office is not expected to release its final report on the Cooper plan until next week. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office disputed a report in Thursday’s Washington Post that its preliminary estimates indicated that the Cooper bill would add roughly $150 billion to the deficit over six years. That would be about twice the increase it estimated for the President’s plan.

“We can say quite clearly that those are not our numbers,” spokesman Mark DeSautels said.