Dole Vows to Fight Employer Mandate : Health: The President is upbeat about passage of reforms this year. But GOP leader says he will block any bill requiring firms to pay for workers’ coverage.

As President Clinton urged Americans on Saturday to press a slow-moving Congress to enact universal health care coverage this year, the Senate’s leading Republican threatened to block any plan requiring businesses to pay for it.

In his weekly radio address, Clinton declared that major health care reform is “closer than ever before,” and he commended the work of Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who are moving legislation through their respective committees. He said everyone needs the security of health insurance coverage.

“The only way all of our people will be secure is when every American knows that whether they lose their job, change jobs, move their home, get sick, get injured or just grow old, their health care will be there,” the President said.

But Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said in a speech at the Republican National Committee’s Northeast regional meeting in Boston that he has “reached a point” where he was prepared to block passage of health care reform and put the issue at the center of this fall’s political campaigns--if the Democrats insist on requiring employers to pay for their workers’ insurance.

Dole said he wanted to explore bipartisan compromises but acknowledged that Republicans have been unable so far to settle on a single plan. He said more than 90% of Americans, however, could be covered without the so-called employer mandates and suggested he would not yield on that Democrat-favored feature.

With time running short as Congress eyes adjournment for the fall elections, Dole could orchestrate a GOP filibuster in the Senate or use his position on the Senate Finance Committee, a key panel considering health care reform, to block a Clinton plan.

The statements by Clinton and Dole came as five congressional committees--two in the Senate and three in the House--are running weeks behind schedule in crafting health care reform legislation. However, Kennedy’s Labor and Human Resources Committee gave Clinton’s program a boost last week by becoming the first panel to approve a bill that meets the President’s basic goal of guaranteeing health care coverage for all.

Dole said in his speech that the Kennedy plan--which would finance universal health care coverage through a modified employer mandate--could never pass Congress. “That’s as far as it’s going to go,” Dole said of the committee’s 11-6 approval.

Some key House Democrats, notably Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell of Michigan, whose panel is deadlocked on health care, have been taking a position similar to Dole’s--that Democrats should take the issue back to voters in the midterm elections this year and try again in 1995.

Clinton, however, said he remains optimistic about substantial reforms in the near future.

“For weeks we’ve been told that health care reform is dead, that America will continue to be the only advanced country in the world that spends more than anybody else on health care and does less with it,” he said.

“But the truth is, in spite of all the naysayers, our nation is closer than ever before to achieving a goal that President Truman set after World War II--real health care security for every family.”

Asserting that “half-measures, quick fixes and Band-Aid-style reforms” won’t accomplish the task, Clinton said those who advocate them “say they’re reforming the health care system, but they fail to provide every American with the ironclad guarantee that they’ll have private health insurance that can never be taken away.”

“Let’s cover everyone,” the President urged. “Let’s get the job done this year.”

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed the President, telling a meeting of the American Nurses Assn. in San Antonio on Saturday that “America does not need half-baked, half-hearted reforms. We need real reform.”

The First Lady, who headed the Administration’s health care reform task force, called on Congress not to become “mired in name-calling and gridlock” and not to arrange compromises that would equal less than universal health care coverage.

“This is not a time for incrementalism,” she said, warning the nurses that continued layoffs in the health care industry “will only get worse if we do not reform the system.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the House minority whip, said it was “about even money” whether health care legislation would be enacted this year. But he predicted that Clinton’s plan would fail to pass.

“I don’t think the country wants the Clinton health plan,” Gingrich said on CNN’s “Evans & Novak,” labeling it as “a big-government, big-tax, big-bureaucracy bill.”

“I don’t think the Clinton health plan is going to pass,” he said. “And I think they ought to drop their left-wing ideas and agree to work with us in a bipartisan manner.”