As Presidential Candidate, Bob Kerrey Had Ideas on Health--Now Tune Is Changed : Reform: The Nebraska Democrat is a pillar of the self-described ‘mainstream’ Senate group that’s promoting a modest, market-based plan.

Back in 1992, when he was running for President, Bob Kerrey wanted to scrap private health insurance, raise taxes by $230 billion and set up a government-financed health system. He called it “the only real solution.”

But times have changed and so has Kerrey. Now the Nebraska Democrat is a pillar of the self-described “mainstream” Senate group that’s promoting a modest, market-based reform plan derided as minimalist by his old allies.

The conversion has put Kerrey at the center of whatever action is left this year on health reform. It also has prolonged and exacerbated his prickly relationship with the man who beat him out for the White House.

There’s a leftover “Kerrey for President” poster on the wall of Kerrey’s Senate campaign headquarters this year as he runs for reelection. It’s a joke, but also perhaps an omen for 1996. Kerrey bowed out of the 1992 race saying he wouldn’t mind trying again.

The Clinton-Kerrey dynamic has been laced with unusual tension from the start. Clinton avoided the Vietnam draft; Kerrey served, lost half a leg and won the Medal of Honor.

In July, in a contretemps in Nebraska, Kerrey found himself defending remarks he’d made about Clinton in 1992. “I said he was going to be opened up like a soft-shell peanut” by the opposition, he recalled. “I never said Bill Clinton was a draft-dodger. I never said terrible things about his intentions, his desires.”

Relations seemed to hit rock bottom when Clinton had to plead with Kerrey for the final vote needed to pass his massive economic plan last year. Their conversations were punctuated with obscenities and phone slamming.

When Kerrey finally came through, it was grudgingly. He said he was doing it because Clinton said it would save his presidency. Behind the scenes, he bargained to become head of a commission on how to cut federal spending.

Kerrey started this year blasting Clinton’s health care plan, which aimed for universal coverage through the private insurance market.

Then he turned on the Democratic National Committee, which ran White House-approved ads in his state this summer to try to win him over to the Clinton cause. “It’s a waste of money, it’s counterproductive, it’s irritating and it doesn’t influence me at all,” Kerrey said angrily.

He said the party should run ads urging Clinton to drop his insistence on making employers pay for worker health care. Earlier, he’d become one of only two Democrats to co-sponsor a Republican bill requiring individuals rather than employers to buy insurance.

Kerrey gives several explanations for his health care odyssey. No. 1, he says, “there’s been an unprecedented change in the market, in its capacity to control costs.”

Nos. 2 and 3 are his discoveries that wealthy people receive health care tax subsidies and direct payments “at the expense of people who don’t have much income,” and that soaring entitlement spending--the subject of his commission--is a “terrifying problem.”

Some experts would dispute his first point, and the second two points were true when he ran for President. There may be another facet to Kerrey’s transformation: the reality check provided by his brief presidential fling. “We have to have the consent of the people,” he says now.