Clinton Health Reform

Clinton Health Reform The success of the Obama health care reform has been studied extensively, but there remains one topic worth discussing further, which is why Obama succeeded when the Clinton health care reform plan failed. This paper will analyze this issue and come to some conclusions about this important question. In 1993, President Clinton announced his health care security plan. A large health policy team had put the plan together, and it represented substantial compromise and hard work.

At the time of the announcement it seemed a near certainty that this plan would be made into law, but this would not come to pass (Starr, 1995). The plan initially received a two-thirds positive rating in polling of the American public, but it still managed to fail. The proposal centered around an individual mandate, which at the time had been supported broadly by many Republicans and almost every interest group involved in the negotiations (Starr, 1995).

Major interest groups that had been traditionally opposed to health care reform had lent their support, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which even approved the employer mandate. Starr (1995) argues that Clinton's health care reform collapsed not because of public opposition but because of the health care task force, which was comprised of over 500 working groups. These groups were disbanded in May of 1993, and this left the health reform treading water without any real direction and no administrative momentum, Clinton himself distracted by an ongoing budget crisis.

The lag between the proposal and getting this bill to law was sufficient to allow groups opposed to the reform to organize and begin to mount an opposition. Their efforts were further buoyed by a decline in Clinton's personal credibility. Part of the problem lay with early supporters of the reform. Republicans who supported the reform backed away from it, but so did key interest groups, having seen that there was opposition beginning to mount and seeking distance from what was beginning to look like a troubled President.

These are not traits of the Obama reform. First, the Obama reform never had the support of many of these interest groups, nor any Republicans. Groups that for Clinton had engaged in compromise and negotiation only to lose their resolve were never interested in negotiation, compromise or any sort of idea generation of their own. Obama simply worked around them, working with his Congressional majority and personal credibility. Where Clinton faced attacks on his credibility, Obama faced no such attacks -- only ones that appealed to his pre-existing far-right adversaries.

Skocpol (1996) noted that another problem was that adversaries of Clinton's plan successfully pushed the idea that middle class American would see their health care insurance costs rise. This notion gained traction with the public, and the reforms declined in popularity, giving further incentive for soft supporters to back away from the plan, even components that they themselves had sponsored. Obama is currently facing a similar issue now, with consumers whose coverage is being cancelled to be replace with more comprehensive (and therefore expensive) coverage.

As with Clinton, this is not resonating well for Obama. However, this is occurring long after the passage of.