Health-care reform finds allies

WASHINGTON — In a new sign of how the political climate is shifting, powerful business interests that once teamed to defeat Democratic health-care overhaul plans are joining with labor unions and other unlikely allies to push proposals for extending medical insurance to millions of Americans.

Among the new champions of reform is the trade group representing the nation's leading health-insurance companies — the same industry that developed the "Harry and Louise" television ad campaign that helped turn public opinion against the universal health-care plan developed by President Clinton and then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1994.

So devastating was the defeat of the Clinton plan that Washington politicians have hesitated to offer comprehensive proposals for change since then. Indeed, while Democrats talked of health-care costs in the 2006 election campaign, they have offered only modest proposals on the issue even though they won control of both houses of Congress. Republican governors have offered some of the most ambitious reform proposals recently, but GOP leadership in Washington has been muted on the topic.

Now, nongovernment coalitions of seemingly strange bedfellows are stepping into the vacuum.

Today, the president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, will stand with the director of the Business Roundtable, which represents leading U.S. corporations, to announce a new campaign for health reform. On Thursday, private health-insurance companies will join with doctors' organizations and health activist groups on the left to announce a separate plan for universal coverage.

"This week marks a kind of tipping point," says Karen Ignagni, who represents the health-insurance industry in Washington. "The health-insurance problem has been with us for decades. With all these different efforts you are seeing a consensus emerge that the time for action is now."

Members of the group Ignagni now leads produced the much talked-about "Harry and Louise" commercials, in which a middle-aged couple expressed alarm over the prospect of government meddling in their personal decisions about health care.

The two plans being announced this week follow ambitious blueprints for universal health coverage put forward by two prominent Republican politicians: California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008.

Governors from a dozen other states are considering similar proposals.

Now Democratic constituent groups, including labor and seniors organizations, are joining with big business to demand a substantive response to a problem that has resulted in 46 million uninsured people and gnawed at the ability of U.S. corporations to compete internationally.

"You take these two events, and you take what's happening in the states, and what you are seeing is a real surge of interest in the issue of health reform ... and the feeling that enough is enough about saying that the sky is falling — let's start to do something to put some answers out there," said John Rother, director of policy and strategy for AARP, the seniors lobby. AARP is part of both coalitions.

The new proposals might embolden Democrats, but party leaders still note caution within their ranks. "I think the Democrats are concerned lest they seem too radical," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., chairman of the House health subcommittee.

"We've got to win again in 2008, and I don't think we want to come out and talk about universal coverage or anything that sounds like socialized medicine," he said. Stark is the author of a plan that would use Medicare as a model to cover the uninsured.

Stern, the union leader, has made it a personal campaign in recent months to meet with corporate chieftains around the country, urging a joint effort on comprehensive reform. His goal is to force action in Washington.

Stern says the traditional job-based medical-insurance system "simply isn't working." Both announcements this week will include plans for lobbying and grass-roots campaigns to assure action on Capitol Hill.

The other, broader coalition will focus on health care exclusively, presenting a detailed proposal for the expansion of coverage, starting with children. Its members range from generally conservative organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Families USA, a liberal advocacy group that was one of the principal champions of the Clinton overhaul plan.