Gore Hammers Away at Health Care Issue

Vice President Al Gore spent Day Two of his “progress and prosperity” tour drumming up support in this rural swing district Wednesday and laying out his plan to protect Medicare and improve the health care system.

In a speech that resembled the Cliffs Notes version of his address in New York on Tuesday, Gore reminded about 150 doctors and patients at a private rehabilitation center of the country’s economic turnaround in the last eight years.

“The question is, will we be better off still in terms of our affluence and in terms of our spirit four years from this day?” the Democratic presidential candidate asked the group.

Gore will be hammering away at this theme for the next three weeks as his tour takes him to battleground states around the country. Pennsylvania, with its 23 electoral votes, is one of the most important swing states in the presidential election.

Gore has invested significant time in this state, whose Republican governor, Thomas J. Ridge, is frequently named as a possible running-mate pick for George W. Bush.

“It’s one of the very small number of states that’s really, really important,” Gore told a local television station Wednesday.

Gore reiterated Wednesday his proposal to put funding for Medicare in a “lockbox” that could not be raided by Congress, taking away “the temptation of seeing Medicare as a piggy bank.”

He also announced that he would create a health care trust fund that would be funded by the federal budget surplus. Most of the projects to be supported by the fund are programs Gore has already announced, such as providing affordable health insurance to all children and expanding coverage to working parents.

However, his proposal Wednesday included two new elements: One was a still-undetermined amount of money for nursing homes, hospitals and other health care providers; the campaign did not detail how the money would be spent.

The other new feature calls for adding a prescription drug benefit for seniors on Medicare by 2002. Originally, Gore hoped to launch the benefit by 2006, but aides now say projections of larger budget surpluses would make the benefit available sooner.

The vice president also repeated his support for a patients’ bill of rights and a law to outlaw discrimination based upon a person’s genetic makeup--preventing, for example, an insurance company from discriminating against a person whose family has a history of cancer.

Gore’s campaign had to switch the location of the Scranton event at the last minute after a bishop on the board of a local Catholic hospital where the vice president was going to appear said he was against hosting the abortion-rights candidate.

Bishop James C. Timlin, who is on the board that oversees Mercy Hospital, told a Scranton newspaper that allowing Gore to speak “would look like we don’t care that much about this issue.”

“We consider abortion to be an unspeakable crime,” he added. Timlin spoke up about Gore’s appearance after a complaint from the president of a local anti-abortion group.

Campaign spokesman Chris Lehane said the vice president respected the hospital’s decision.

The Secret Service and Gore’s advance staff scrambled to find a new location.

On Wednesday, about two dozen protesters waving signs reading “Stop Abortion Now” rallied outside Allied Services, a nonprofit health care facility where Gore spoke and led a health care discussion.

Also Wednesday, Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway confirmed reports that Tony Coelho, Gore’s campaign chairman, was admitted to a hospital in the Washington area Monday night with an inflamed colon.

Hattaway said that the former California congressman, 57, is being treated with antibiotics, is resting comfortably and is expected to be released soon.