Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics

President Clinton's defeated health care reform proposal was not the cost-raising, byzantine, cumbersome, choice-restricting mess that critics made it out to be, according to Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard. The Clinton initiative, she insists, would have led, over time, to significantly less government involvement than we have now; its proposed regulations of insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, employers and state governments would have driven down costs and discouraged excessive spending on high-tech medicine, she maintains. In her scenario, Clinton's bill served as a convenient foil for ideologically committed Republicans who rallied the public against the Democrats and against federal social legislation in general, thus paving the way for the Republican triumph in the 1994 congressional elections. While her analysis is often unconvincing, her trenchant critique of the Clinton administration's failure to build a coalition to deepen public support for its health plan holds important lessons for all who wish to revitalize the Democratic Party. Photos. (Apr.)