BOND'S VOICE MIGHT TEMPER RUNAWAY HEALTH-CARE MEASURE

President Clinton is pulling out all the stops these days in promoting his ideas to overhaul America's health care system. At work, too, is a corps of lawmakers believing administration proposals speak more to social experimentation than to revising a system that provides the best medical care on the planet. U.S. Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri has taken a leading role in offering alternatives to the drastic changes built into the Clinton plan. We applaud him for the voice he lends to this issue and for injecting some Missouri common sense into the debate.

Sen. Bond is not without credentials in this area. Since going to Capitol Hill, he has been a leading spokesman on family issues, something that has not always won him favor within his own party. On the current topic, he served three years on a Senate Republican task force trying to identify problems and formulate solutions to the nation's health care problems. Further, he wrote the statement of principles in a Senate Republican alternative measure called "Health Equity and Access Reform Today," a document necessitated in large part because the Clinton administration declined to make his health-care package a bipartisan endeavor.

With this background, then, what Sen. Bond says is that what is right about America's provision of health care must be accentuated and that all reforms to the system must be reasonably paid for. The Missouri lawmaker wants the focus of any legislation to be on providing every American with some measure of health coverage -- a target administration forces certainly can't find fault with -- and controlling the costs of administering the system. Sen. Bond contends the Clinton plan places a heavy burden on the nation's employers, an action that ultimately will restrain economic growth and job creation. Further, the plan threatens to expand the costly bureaucracy of the system, which is the last thing needed in American medicine.

As a separate measure, Sen. Bond is promoting the Health Information Modernization and Security Act, which he says will streamline paperwork, take advantage of new technology, be less expensive and help identify waste and fraud. One of the frustrations of Americans and their physicians is the time spent filling out forms related to health care; in the Bond plan, claims will be filed electronically, patient information will be drawn from a data base (rather than scribbled onto forms countless times) and doctors will cut the hours they spend filling out forms with often duplicate information.

Sen. Bond has been on the forefront of a number of key issues of late. Just last week, the Senate approved a Bond-sponsored amendment that calls for federal support in rebuilding levees damaged in this summer's flooding, a measure that, without strong guidance, could have fallen prey to environmental lobby opposition. With Missouri's John Danforth exiting the Senate at the conclusion of this term, Sen. Bond is stepping forward to accept more of the burden of representing Missouri in the upper chamber of Congress. It is a welcome development, and his voice in the health care debate may go a long way toward tempering a final bill with the potential to hurt American medicine and the economy.