WRONG PRESCRIPTION.

• Author: HELLANDER, IDA
• Position: Bill Bradley's health reforms

Bill Bradley's Health Plan Is No Cure

The rightward drift of the Democratic Party is nowhere more evident than in health care. In September, Bill Bradley, the former Democratic Senator from New Jersey and current Presidential candidate, declared his support for health reforms previously espoused by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation. Bradley's plan is at its core profoundly reactionary, a vehicle for the Heritage Foundation's explicit agenda of "rolling back the welfare state."

Bradley's plan has already been endorsed by Chip Kahn, president of the powerful lobbying group the Health Insurance Association of America. And little wonder: Insurance companies and HMOs stand to gain billions of tax dollars from the Bradley plan, while Americans would still have no right to health care.

Bradley has impressed many with his ideas on race (and his jump shot). Yet his health proposal is so shameless in its $200 billion transfer of tax dollars to the private insurance industry that it might have made Richard Nixon blush. At a time when the possibilities for progressive reform seem bright, why are Bradley's health care proposals so backward?

Meanwhile, Al Gore would not guarantee the right to health care either. Nor would he loosen the chokehold of the insurance industry over health policy. At most, he trumpets his support for the Patient Bill of Rights, advocates putting additional money into the failed Children's Health Insurance Plan, and proposes a modest tax credit so that some in the fifty-five to sixty-five age group could buy into Medicare.

While national health insurance was espoused by Warren Beatty's fictional Senator Bulworth, not a single real-life candidate has the courage to advocate the non-profit national health insurance program America needs and Democrats supported from the New Deal era until the 1992 Clinton candidacy.

Bradley has compared his proposal for the 11.1 million uninsured children to the Medicare program for seniors. This is nonsense. Medicare has guaranteed seniors basic health coverage for more than thirty years. Bradley's proposal is a mandate that parents buy their children private insurance. Admonishing parents to buy private coverage--even if such coverage were affordable and available (which it's not)--is a long way from guaranteeing kids coverage.

Bradley's plan relies on tax credits and a new federal bureaucracy to help poor families afford children's coverage. The subsidies would tempt employers to drop...