Key House Panel Abandons Effort to Write Health Bill : Congress: The Energy and Commerce Committee had been seen as a hope for compromise. Other proposals are likely to be too liberal to pass.

The committee that many had considered the most important health reform testing ground in the House gave up its months-long effort to produce a bill, saying Tuesday that its membership appeared hopelessly at odds.

More than any other single development, this one captured how difficult it has become to find a middle ground among the left, right and myriad special interests.

At one point, the Energy and Commerce Committee had been regarded as the most fertile ground in the House for a grand health compromise. Of the three House committees charged with producing sweeping legislation, its largely moderate membership most closely resembled the House’s overall ideological bent.

The committee’s failure to produce legislation puts enormous pressure on House Democratic leaders to come up with a bill virtually from scratch, because the legislation being produced by the other two House panels is likely to be too liberal to win approval by the House as a whole.

In a letter to House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), which conceded what has been obvious for some time, Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) wrote:

“At this point, it would be counterproductive to convene the committee, call up legislation and consume an enormous amount of time and resources without any assurance of success. A prolonged debate in the Energy and Commerce Committee could undercut or delay the efforts of other committees to bring sound legislation to the floor.”

The White House sought to put the best face on the development, with spokeswoman Lorrie McHugh saying that Dingell’s move demonstrated his commitment to “keeping the process moving forward by focusing on the process on the floor.”

An Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Dingell had come “very, very close” to getting the votes to report out a bill resembling the President’s proposal. “He could have kept working on it but, because time was running out, he wanted to focus on action on the House floor,” the official said.

Deborah Steelman, a Republican analyst and health care lobbyist, agreed: “His role has not been diminished by virtue of what’s happened.”

For Dingell, whose legislative skills are renowned on Capitol Hill, it was also an enormously personal defeat, despite the fact that he and several members of his committee will continue to play a major role in the health debate.

Dingell’s father introduced the first national health insurance bill in Congress more than half a century ago, and the younger Dingell vividly recalls John D. Dingell Sr. being branded a communist and worse for his advocacy of a plan that would guarantee health coverage to every American.

Since succeeding his father in the House upon Dingell Sr.’s death in 1955, Dingell has introduced health legislation modeled on his father’s bill on the first day of every Congress.

He noted in his letter that he had tried a number of approaches to compromise: lightening President Clinton’s proposed requirements that employers pay the lion’s share of their workers’ health costs; reducing the proposed benefits that would be guaranteed to every American; giving less regulatory power to the new government entities the Clinton plan envisioned.

“These and other proposals brought us very close to assembling the votes needed to report a bill,” Dingell wrote. “Unfortunately, neither our proposals nor any other suggested legislation enjoys the support of a majority of committee members.”

With no GOP support, Dingell needed 23 of the panel’s 27 Democrats to pass a bill.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the panel’s health subcommittee, said the effort underscored the difficulty that House Democratic leaders face in an intensely partisan environment where they can count on no Republican votes. In the House as a whole, that means they can afford to lose no more than 39 of the votes of the 256 Democrats and one independent.

“What we’ve seen in our committee is the problem that the leadership is going to have when they get to the House floor,” Waxman said.

Although Dingell’s concession was not unexpected, Bruce Fried, an independent health analyst, said that it, nevertheless, does not bode well for the Clinton Administration when a major bill reaches the House floor.

“The problems that Dingell has experienced will re-emerge in the House,” said Lynn Etheredge, a former health policy analyst in the Office of Management and Budget during the Jimmy Carter Administration.

“This sends a cautionary note,” Etheredge said. “It indicates that it may not be clear sailing ahead just because two other committees (one in the Senate, one in the House) have produced bills.”

The House Education and Labor Committee has produced a bill, but it is significantly more generous than Clinton’s in the benefits that it would offer Americans. “That bill’s a joke,” one senior Democrat said.

Similarly, the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to wrap up its work this week. However, its bill is expected to include a requirement similar to Clinton’s that firms pay 80% of their workers’ health care costs. All sides believe that the so-called employer mandate will have to be modified significantly, if not scrapped, to survive a vote by the full House.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, the Finance Committee--whose deliberations have been the most closely watched in Congress--prepared to begin today its formal public effort to produce a bill.

Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said he plans to offer a modified version of the mandate, which would take effect only if other measures to expand coverage on a voluntary basis did not succeed.

However, it appeared that the committee probably would not even agree to the mandate as a fall-back measure, leaving open the question of whether it can meet Clinton’s bottom-line goal of assuring coverage for everyone. The President has threatened to veto any bill that does not include universal coverage.

Moynihan wants to tax each pack of cigarettes $2 and impose a 1% payroll tax on large companies to help pay for health insurance for all Americans. The mandate in his plan would require all employers to buy insurance for their workers if voluntary measures fail within a few years to cover most of the 39 million now uninsured.

The plan also features a 1.75% tax on health insurance premiums to help pay for academic health centers. This assessment would be paid by the insurance company or health plan that issued the policy.

Also Tuesday, in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton predicted that, if Congress does not pass a health reform bill this year, public pressure will build for a single-payer system, where the government will pay for all health care.

“There will be a grass-roots movement that sweeps this country that will achieve a single-payer system,” she said, possibly around the year 2000.