The Killer Was Not in the GOP but in Ourselves : Health care: People who have dealt with HMOs were loathe to deal with government bureaucracy.

It wasn’t Bob Dole as “Dr. Death” who killed health-care legislation this year.

What really killed it almost guarantees it will never rise like a phoenix from its own ashes. Because we killed it--we who comprise the teeming, suspicious middle class are just too jaded to support it.

The Clintons couldn’t rally us with inspiring words like sacrifice and cheaper since we have heard such words from employers for the past decade. And each time we did, we ended up paying more and getting less.

This is the greatest stomach-churning, “what-about-me?” issue to come along in a generation. Party affiliations play no role.

Hillary and Bill should have attended more meetings where employers push cheaper health plans down the throats of their workers, meetings where even meek and passive employees breathe fire and talk homemade bombs.

Hillary should have asked all those small-business people she met, “What happens when you try to change health insurance? How do workers take to that?” She wouldn’t be licking her wounds now, for they would surely have answered, “They take to it like ammonia takes to bleach. Our goal is to get out of the room alive.”

No, it wasn’t Republicans and insurance executives who killed health-care legislation. They only exploited our fears.

We killed the plan, we who see what increased efficiency and streamlining have already done to choice and common sense in health care.

We see it in open-enrollment meetings, at which insurance representatives say it’s “logical” to pay for abortions and live births but not for birth-control pills, well-baby checks and vaccinations.

We see it when we call for hospitalization approval and the 19-year-old clerk currently in control of our life asks, “When the doctor said to get your son immediately to the hospital for meningitis, like did she do a test? Is this an emergency?”

President Clinton just can’t persuade us he can make health care better because we are too busy holding on to what we have, too terrified of losing it.

So, despite the fact that we hate this system, despite how sorry we are for the great number of “uninsured,” we probably will kill his plan all over again next year.