50 Firms Back Health Mandate; Democrats Meet

As President Clinton received a show of big-business support Thursday for his proposal to make all employers provide health insurance for workers, congressional leaders sought to heal painful divisions within Democratic ranks over the scope and cost of health care reform.

House and Senate Democratic leaders met with Clinton on Thursday night at the White House to brief him on their efforts to reach agreement on bills to take to the floors of their respective chambers and to discuss plans and strategy for the legislative floor fights to come.

After the White House session with the President and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the congressional leaders proclaimed a “new spirit” of agreement but offered no new details to back up that claim.

The bills that House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) plan to present, probably next week, will pursue Clinton’s goal of universal coverage but will be “less bureaucratic, more voluntary and phased in over a longer period of time” than Clinton’s original proposal from last year, Mitchell said, echoing statements that Clinton and his top aides have been making for several weeks.

Earlier in the day, a coalition of 50 of America’s largest corporate employers endorsed the “employer mandate” that has emerged as the biggest single stumbling block to passage of Clinton’s health plan.

The coalition, whose membership includes the Big Three auto makers, Bethlehem Steel, Safeway, and Manpower Inc., warned that, if Congress fails to enact a major health measure this year, “it is unlikely to have another chance at comprehensive reform in this century.” Many of the individual companies have been longtime supporters of the mandate.

With House and Senate leaders wrangling over final details of their own health care bills, the big-business endorsement was offered to counter recent indications that the President has failed in efforts to recruit any significant business backing for his reform plan.

The bills being negotiated behind closed doors by congressional Democrats will provide the components of the blueprint that Clinton and his party will take to the final battle over the legislation.

In both houses, Democratic leaders spent much of Thursday plotting their strategy for bringing health bills to their respective floors.

In the House, Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) presented crucial committee chairmen with a complicated compromise proposal. He hoped that the plan would end a nasty squabble over jurisdiction that has prevented any progress from being made on other substantive issues this week.

Foley and Gephardt plan to use a bill written by the Ways and Means Committee as the vehicle for building the legislation that they will take to the floor.

However, that plan drew objections from the chairmen and subcommittee chairmen of the other two committees with jurisdiction over the health issue--the Education and Labor Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee--in large part because it would remove much of their influence over health-related issues in the future.

The heated intramural battle has set back by several days the effort to put together a bill to take to the floor.

Even when Democratic leaders satisfy their committee chairmen, they will face the ultimate battle on the floors of the House and the Senate, trying to assemble a majority for the controversial core of the President’s plan: a new federal law requiring employers to provide health insurance for all workers.

Major business organizations--such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable--have decided that the employer mandate for health insurance is a new and costly intrusion of government into business. They refused to accept it, despite promises from the President that the reforms would slow the rapid increase in the cost of health care and that smaller companies with low-wage workers would be given subsidies to offset the effect of the new mandate.

And many individual companies once enrolled on the President’s side are now having second thoughts. On Monday, a corporate coalition of 21 firms, including General Electric, Pacific Telesis, Du Pont, Atlantic Richfield, McDonnell Douglas and US West, all early supporters of health reform, sent Clinton a letter with a blunt warning that they could never back any legislation giving states the power to design independent health care structures.

These firms, which operate throughout the country with a standard package of benefits set by management, fear that they would be confronted with a new patchwork of rules and varying benefits in different states.

Eager to show that they still have some corporate allies, the Administration and congressional Democrats arranged a press conference Thursday by an ad hoc coalition of 50 firms that have been strong supporters of the mandate because they already provide generous health benefits to their workers.

“If we don’t make sure every single citizen is covered,” Gephardt said at the conference, “the real losers are big businesses that will wind up footing the bill.”

Chrysler, Ford and General Motors spent nearly $6 billion last year to provide health insurance for 2.8 million workers, retirees and dependents, said Andrew H. Card Jr., president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn.

“We have moved aggressively to control our health costs but we cannot control health costs shifted to us because of those who do not pay their fair share,” Card, a former transportation secretary, said at the news conference.

Steve Burd, chief executive officer of Safeway, said his firm competes “with some very large companies that don’t offer the same kind of coverage.” If health reform doesn’t pass with the employer mandate, Safeway might be forced to curtail its coverage “to level the playing field,” Burd said.

Administration business supporters appear to be in a distinct minority. At another news conference Thursday, Herman Cain, president of Godfather’s Pizza and the National Restaurant Assn., denounced mandates as a new form of tax that would wipe out jobs. “Mandate, mandate, any way you say it, we oppose it,” he said.

And the Assn. of Private Pension and Welfare Plans, which had backed mandates, said it now opposes all of the health reform bills adopted by the committees.

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.