1 gen 1994 anni - Pres Bill Clinton's health insurance reform effort fails

Descrizione:

Clinton tried to steer a centrist course. On his left was the Democratic Party’s weakened but still vocal liberal wing. On his right were party moderates influenced by Reagan-era notions of reducing government regulation and the welfare state. Clinton’s “third way,” as he dubbed it, tried to satisfy these two quite different — and often antagonistic — political constituencies. Clinton had notable successes as well as spectacular failures pursuing this course.

A spectacular failure came first. Clinton’s most ambitious social-welfare goal was to provide a system of health care that would cover all Americans, including the estimated 40 million who had no insurance, and reduce the burden of medical costs on the larger economy. This objective had eluded every Democratic president since Harry Truman. Clinton’s health-care task force — led by First Lady Hillary Clinton — proposed a system of “managed competition” among private insurance companies, but the cost of the proposed system would fall heavily on employers, and many campaigned strongly against it. So did the powerful lobbies of the health insurance industry and the American Medical Association. By mid-1994, Democratic leaders in Congress declared that the Clintons’ universal health-care proposal was dead.

Clinton’s plan to reduce budget deficits, in contrast, proved an unlikely success. In 1993, he secured a five-year budget package that would reduce the federal deficit by $500 billion. Republicans unanimously opposed the proposal because it raised taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, and liberal Democrats complained because it limited social spending. No one could complain about the results: by 1998, Clinton’s fiscal policies had balanced the federal budget and begun to pay down the federal debt — at a rate of $156 billion a year between 1999 and 2001. The economy boomed, thanks in part to the low-interest rates stemming from deficit reduction.

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