Clinton Health Plan Collapse

* “Blame for Health Plan’s Collapse Falls Everywhere” (Aug. 28) fails to give credit to the American public for its wisdom. As time went on, America realized several things:

* The bill was taking us down the road to socialism--the very thing that the rest of the world was running from as quickly as possible. Socialism is a failed philosophy.

* America already has the best health delivery system in the world. Why destroy it?

* Do we really want our health delivery system controlled by 50-100 new federal bureaucracies? We have seen that government is the problem. Why allow it to totally screw up our health system?

* The so-called “health crisis” is at least partially a figment of the President’s imagination.

* Why should the public trust anything put together under a cloak of secrecy by a body of people accountable to no one?

JAMES G. KREDER

Laguna Beach

* As one who spent much of 1993 and 1994 traveling around the country debating representatives from the White House on the merits of the original Clinton health plan and offering an alternative without the excessive governmental costs and bureaucracies, I particularly enjoyed the article by Karen Tumulty and Edwin Chen (Aug. 28).

Your reporters did an excellent job of pointing out some of the flaws in the Clinton plan and laying out the reasons why it has not been popularly received, either in Congress or by the American people.

One major problem with the Clinton plan was overlooked in the article and also missed in the comments by Prof. Uwe Reinhardt. The real reason the Clinton plan was such a failure was that it didn’t take into account the practical workings of today’s health care system and the views of the America people who are served by the health care system. I believe the plan was fatally flawed when a narrow group of so-called experts, most from within the Beltway, joined with special interests to try to develop in a vacuum the “perfect” governmental solution for all of our health care problems.

I learned in traveling around my state and in other states what the problems were and the views of the people. They pointed out practical solutions that the inside-the-Beltway group ignored. It was for this reason that the original Chafee plan (John Chafee, R-R.I.), which I helped draft, and the subsequent “mainstream” compromise plan put forward by a bipartisan group, reflected a much less intrusive, less expensive, and non-bureaucratic solution to the problems in the health care system today.

It is not accurate to say that special interests were responsible for killing the Clinton health care plan and the Clinton-Mitchell (George Mitchell, D-Me.) substitute. The fatal flaws and misconceptions were built into the plan from the start. The American people, who looked at the plan and did not like what they saw, were the reason it has gone nowhere.

There still are some major flaws that we need to correct in the health care delivery system in America. I hope that we will be able to listen to the people we are supposed to serve and draft appropriate legislation to fix only that which is wrong with the system.

SEN. CHRISTOPHER S. BOND

R-Mo.

* Let’s first of all cancel all medical and dental perks paid by us and enjoyed by our lawmakers and their families. Then let’s see if these stubborn senators and congressmen won’t conclude that we do have a health crisis!

RACHELLE MOYAL-PUSEY

Los Angeles