Clinton’s TV Ads Push Health Reform : Legislation: All-out effort aims at speaking ‘directly to the American people.’ Administration is vague about what bill the President is backing.

President Clinton appeared in paid television advertisements Thursday and members of his Cabinet hit the road for press interviews as the Administration began an all-out effort to lobby for passage of health reform.

But as has been true for weeks, the Administration continued to be vague about precisely what bill the President is supporting, a stance attributable to the tangled politics of Capitol Hill.

With at least two differing proposals being offered by the Democratic leadership--one by House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), the other by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.)--Clinton carefully avoided endorsing any specific piece of legislation in the television ads. Instead, he urged support only for “the new health care approach that will be voted on soon.”

“Whose plan passes is not important,” Clinton says in the Cable News Network ad. “What is important is that you have guaranteed private health insurance that can never be taken away.”

Whose bill passes is, however, quite important to the members of Congress who have to vote on them. In the House, Democrats increasingly have been warning that Gephardt’s approach is in danger. Many Democrats are nervous about voting for the bill’s requirement that all companies insure their workers unless the Senate does so as well. Clinton’s praise for Mitchell’s bill in his press conference Wednesday night appeared to be easing the way for other Democrats to suggest that something less sweeping than Gephardt’s plan might be better.

Mitchell’s bill would impose an employer mandate in the year 2002 and then only on a state-by-state basis if a combination of insurance market reforms and subsidies have not succeeded in covering at least 95% of the Americans in a particular state.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) insisted that he is “highly confident” Gephardt’s bill will pass. The House is now scheduled to spend the week of Aug. 15 debating and voting on health care reform with a final vote scheduled for Aug. 19.

But few seemed to share Foley’s professed confidence. “I think you might see . . . (that) we’ll cut out everything . . . and slip in (the) Mitchell (bill),” Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) said in an interview. “Everybody here’s in an uproar,” she added.

There was additional uproar in the Senate, where Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) objected from the floor to Clinton’s implication during his Wednesday night press conference that GOP-sponsored health reform bills would not help Americans such as Daniel Lumley and John Cox, whom the President introduced during the session.

“As far as I know, every single bill that has been introduced by Democrats, Republicans or bipartisan groups takes care of the pre-existing conditions,” Dole said, referring to the current insurance industry practice of restricting coverage for people who already have health problems.

Some conservatives and moderates might vote for a bill that concentrated on eliminating such restrictions and did little more. The problem that Clinton and his allies in Congress face, however, is that moves aimed at producing a more limited bill are unlikely to gain even a single Republican vote in the House, where Republican members seem united against anything close to what Clinton has proposed. But such more limited bills would risk losing Democratic votes from liberals who think that Mitchell already has compromised too much.

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Five liberal Democratic senators called a press conference Thursday to say that their votes for Mitchell’s bill “cannot be taken for granted” and that the majority leader’s bill must be “strengthened” to ensure greater coverage than 95% of the population.

“We are very determined to improve this bill,” said Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.). He was joined by Sens. Paul Simon of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio.

Yet another group, this one made up of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats led by Reps. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), J. Roy Rowland (D-Ga.), Fred Grandy (R-Iowa) and Michael Bilirakis (R-Fla.), has been working against a Monday deadline to produce an alternative bill that could be offered on the House floor.

Cooper and his colleagues in the past have offered proposals that would reform insurance markets to ban discriminatory practices, thus allowing consumers to take their insurance from job to job and to buy coverage even though they or their family members have existing illnesses. They would also offer some subsidies to help lower-income workers afford insurance.

The combination of insurance reforms and subsidies has been highly popular among many members of Congress, who see the approach as a politically safer alternative to the employer mandates contained in Gephardt’s bill and, in a weaker form, in Mitchell’s.

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The key problem for the moderate group has been its inability to agree on how to pay for the subsidies that its members back. Most Republicans have been unwilling to sign onto anything that even resembles a tax increase to pay for subsidies, Grandy has said.

At the White House, Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said that the Clinton television ads are an effort “to speak directly to the American people. There’s been an incredible amount of information and misinformation around the issue of health care over the months. More money has been spent on this issue than on any other issue of public policy perhaps in history.”

Democratic strategists hope to broadcast the two-minute ads on CNN every night until the Senate begins voting on health care next week. The move is unusual--presidents routinely advertise during their reelection campaigns but do not ordinarily do so to urge support for their programs.

White House officials said that they chose the approach in part because ABC, CBS and NBC had refused to provide free time for an Oval Office speech on health care. The three commercial networks also declined to sell time to the Democratic National Committee for the two-minute advertisements, saying that they already had sold all the time they had set aside for political advertising.

The spots will be appear on the cable network at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time.