Gore Leadership Is Anemic on Health Care, Bradley Says

Faulting Vice President Al Gore for a failure of leadership, former Senator Bill Bradley chided Gore on Tuesday for having “turned his back” on a full-bore approach to solving the nation’s medical insurance woes.

Bradley used a sedate morning public forum on health care to question Gore’s commitment to overhauling a medical insurance system that does not provide coverage for more than 40 million Americans. The former senator from New Jersey also leveled scorn at both Gore and President Clinton for giving up after the administration’s 1992 health care plan was scuttled in Congress.

“The lesson that our leaders--and Al Gore--seem to have learned from the health care defeat of 1992 was that big, bold solutions to a national problem cannot happen in Washington, so let’s do a few small, symbolic things,” Bradley said, adding: “That was the wrong lesson.”

The two Democratic presidential aspirants have quibbled for weeks over who has the better approach for extending health coverage to the uninsured. Bradley’s sweeping overhaul of Medicaid has drawn criticism for its cost and potential displacement of poor patients. Gore’s more pinpointed approach is in turn flawed, some observers say, by its timidity and failure to target enough of the uninsured.

“It’s the task of leadership to set the goal and point the way and then get there, come hell or high water,” Bradley told an audience of 250 people who turned out for the New Hampshire Presidential Forum on Health Care. He added that failing to provide coverage for the 43 million uninsured is “morally unacceptable.”

Peppered by questions from an audience crowded with elderly Manchester residents and health industry workers and activists, Bradley acknowledged he has given ammunition to Gore and other critics by being specific early in the primary season about the dimensions of his medical coverage proposal, estimated to cost up to $65 billion annually. He likened the firefight over health care in recent weeks to “putting out a piece of raw meat in a cave full of wolves.”

Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University professor of political economics and an expert in the health care debate, said Tuesday that the continued sniping between Bradley and Gore over their rival health care programs is obscuring the “proper debate that should be going on.” Reinhardt, who is sympathetic with Bradley’s plan to abolish Medicaid and replace it with a sliding-scale mixture of federal and private coverage, said “the Republicans are smiling while the Democrats are slicing each other up.”

But by defining his plan early on, Bradley said, “you have a much better chance of overcoming the opposition of special interests than if you were vague” until the general election.

Several audience members said afterward that they fear special-interest counterattacks--such as the infamous “Harry and Louise” television ads that helped kill Clinton’s health care reform in 1992--would again wreak havoc on any attempt to pass universal coverage in Congress.

“If being specific now helps give Bradley an upper hand later, I’m all for it,” said Roger Hough, a telecommunications consultant who said he admires the former senator’s health care blueprint.

Gore aides have continued to pillory Bradley’s plan for costing too much, over-relying on federal surplus dollars and swelling the numbers of the uninsured by forcing poor Medicaid patients out of a system they are comfortable with and into an untested new system.

The Bradley campaign was again forced to go on the defensive Tuesday after Associated Press reported that his campaign had hired temporary staffers who received no health care coverage during stints as computer and telephone bank workers. According to the wire service, Bradley’s campaign staff hired workers through five temporary employment agencies that provide no health insurance benefits.

Anita Dunn, Bradley’s director of communications, said the workers had been employed from January through September, but added the campaign no longer uses temporary staffers. Dunn said the hires came during the campaign’s “chaotic start-up” phase, but conceded the campaign had not directly asked the temp firms if they gave health benefits to their workers.

“Bill Bradley has proposed a plan where that shouldn’t be an issue,” Dunn said. “Al Gore’s plan wouldn’t have done a thing for those workers.” Dunn also questioned whether Gore’s own “per diem” campaign workers receive health benefits.