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The Clinton health care plan was a 1993 healthcare reform package proposed by the administration of Bill Clinton, then sitting President of the United States.

Contents 1 History 2 Defeat 3 References 4 External links

Clinton had campaigned heavily on health care in the 1992 election, and he quickly set up the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration's first-term agenda.

The result, announced by Clinton in an address to Congress on September 22, 1993, was a complex proposal running more than 1,000 pages, the core element of which was an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees through competitive but closely-regulated health maintenance organizations (HMOs). The plan, referred to derisively as "Hillary Care" by some, was initially well-received by liberal political leaders and some Americans who said health care was the most important issue facing the country.^{[citation needed]}

At its introduction, the plan seemed likely to pass through the Democratic-controlled Congress.^{[citation needed]} Conservatives, libertarians, and the insurance industry, however, staged an effective and well-organized campaign opposing Clinton's "Health Security" plan and criticized it as being overly bureaucratic and restrictive of patient choice.^{[citation needed]} The effort included extensive advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous Harry and Louise ad, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan's supposed bureaucratic nature. The advertisements might have been particularly effective because they characterized Clinton's plan as being against middle class values.^[1] Op-eds were written against it, including one in The Washington Post by University of Virginia Professor Martha Derthick that said, "In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete ... with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me."^[2]

Meanwhile, Democrats, instead of uniting behind the President's original proposal, offered a number of competing plans of their own. Some criticized the plan from the left, preferring a Canadian-style single payer system.^{[citation needed]}

On September 26, 1994, George J. Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that the plan was dead, at least for that session of Congress. The defeat weakened Clinton politically, and contributed to widespread public frustration with perceived Congressional gridlock.^{[citation needed]} In the 1994 election, the Republican revolution gave the GOP control of both houses of Congress, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive reform aimed at creating universal health care in the United States has not been seriously considered by Congress since.

• "The Great Health Care Debate of 1993-1994" by Derek Bok in Public Talk
• "What Happened to Health Care Reform?" by Paul Starr in The American Prospect
• Timeline from PBS's The System
• C-SPAN3 Programming from 1993-94 on the Clinton Health Care Plan