HEALTH CARE PLAN IS ENTITLEMENT GRANT

"We have not the slightest idea what any of these health care plans will cost."

Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that, five weeks ago, voted out the "outline" of an as-of-then-unwritten "health care reform bill".

"Panel Says Future Looks Dark, Hobbled By Too Many Promises To Keep"

-- Headline on news story referring to federal entitlement spending obligations already in the pipeline, Page 3A, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Monday, August 8, 1994.

"Republicans Lying About Health Care, Panetta Says"

-- Headline on news story, Page 7A, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Monday, August 8, 1994.

That the two above-captioned news stories appeared in the news columns of the same edition of the daily newspaper, I found instructive. As is Sen. Moynihan's stunningly candid, if rather inconvenient, confession.

Entitlements -- the very word says something about democratic governance runamok -- refer to spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal retirement programs, welfare and food stamps. Some excerpts from the story on runaway spending, taken from a report released by the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement Reform:

"By 2003, entitlement spending and interest payments on federal debt will take more than 70 cents of every dollar paid in federal taxes.

"By 2012, not a penny will be left over for any other government program, once the bill has been paid for entitlements and the national debt.

"By 2030, we won't even be able to pay interest on the debt, the group says. That means nothing will be left for roads, bridges, education, defense, foreign aid, disaster assistance, agriculture programs or any other government service."

The current health care debate in Washington, D.C. is, of course, about enacting the Big Enchilada of all entitlements, outstripping anything currently on the books. In this regard, recall one fact from the glory days of the Great Society, when a beneficient government told us they could solve any problem. When Medicaid was enacted in the mid-'60s, government "experts" projected the cost by 1990 at $9 billion. Actual 1990 cost: $111 billion. The same sort of "experts" Hillary Clinton hired to secretly write her health care bill were off, in that case, by a factor of greater than 10.

Here, then is what the President, his co-President and your elected representatives along the Potomac are really up to this week, and next, and the week after that:

Voting, to reorganize the one-seventh of the gigantic U.S. economy that is our health care system, on bills printed for the first time short days, or even hours ago. Voting on 1,000-plus page bills (copies available, $80 each) which, days after being produced, are the subject of more than 80 substantive changes. Voting on "outlines" of bills as-yet unwritten. Voting on "outlines" of bills that, when reduced to bill form, bear no resemblance to what some members thought they had voted on. Voting on bills the members haven't read. Voting on bills that run more than -- pick a number! -- 1,400, 1,600, 1,700 pages. Voting to mesh bills that combine, in the Congressional Budget Office's useful metaphor, different bills in a manner similar to "a piston from a Toyota, a carburator from a Ford, valves from a Chrysler." Voting at midnight. Voting at three in the morning.

Voting the largest expansion in the Entitlement/Welfare state ever proposed, at the very time an independent commission on entitlements is ringing a firebell in the night about such currently mandated spending.

This, then is what legislating about health care has become as we grind on through the dog days of summer, 1994. The progress of the health care debate has debased, without exception, every principle of honest, open and principled debate in a democracy. In what we used to call the world's Greatest Deliberative Body, the corruption of process, of careful deliberation and fact-based argument, is complete, the rout of fairness, total. It is a grotesque theatre of the absurd, a bizarre circus hailed by cynical barkers, rivaling anything ever produced by the most accomplished practitioners of either genre. Lights! Cameras! Action! Mandates! Cost Control! Universal Coverage! "Soft" Triggers! "Hard" Triggers! Fairness! Compassion! Get a bill out! Any bill!

All done with (Ital.) your (Unital.) tax money, in the hallowed halls of (Ital.) your (Unital.) capitol, to (Ital.) your (Unital.) health care, by people (Ital.) you (Unital.) sent there, to transact (Ital.) your (Unital.) business.

I say, God help the Honorable Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, together with his Democratic colleague, the Honorable Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, and kindred souls who have the sense, the stomach and the sheer moral courage to say, "I will use every power at my command to stop this rush to judgment, this sheer madness."

Peter Kinder is associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and is a state senator from Cape Girardeau.