MAINSTREAM HEALTH CARE ALTERNATIVE DOESN'T PASS MUSTER

The CBS Evening News led Thursday evening with a report saying that on Capitol Hill health care reform is attached to life support, on the critical list and fading fast. The day of that report -- Thursday, Aug. 18, -- should go down as a turning point in the great health care debate of 1994. It was on that day that the roof fell in on a group of moderate senators trying to fashion what they call a mainstream alternative to the government-controlled medicine mapped out in the Clinton-backed Mitchell and Gephardt health care bills.

"If you looked at the price tag and how much it produced for expanded coverage, it was very, very sobering," said Minnesota Republican Sen. David Durnberger, a certified member of the self-styled mainstream group. Durnberger and other moderates had just emerged from a meeting with Robert Reischauer, director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. It is the CBO's job to estimate the costs of the various health care proposals floating through Congress on their way to becoming law.

These staff cost estimates have had a "chastening" effect on Senate moderates, said Missouri Sen. Jack Danforth, one of their number. Added Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, "I just don't sense movement in this body to pass" the health legislation.

Even before Thursday's telling session on what the health care plans would cost, the mainstream group had suffered one important defection. Oklahoma Democratic Sen. David Boren, a former Rhodes scholar, emerged from another frustrating session and headed for the Senate floor. There, he urged that his colleagues to "stop this train right now and get off."

Sen. Boren is sufficiently frustrated with what we used to call the world's greatest deliberative body that he is quitting this fall to assume the presidency of the University of Oklahoma. He told an interviewer he thinks he knows "why the American people are so anxious" about health reform. "They see the spectacle of Congress rushing to pass a bill for the sake of passing a bill -- and one that could be so sweeping that it could leave costs out of control and have all sorts of unintended consequences." Sounds like Sen. Boren is mindful of the great admonition to physicians (and lawmakers?) contained in the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm."

Still, Boren has an important cautionary note for the mainstream group of moderates whom he has just left. "I've been worried that the mainstream group would fall into the trap of proposing amendments to the Mitchell bill just to get a few Republicans and moderate Democrats to reach 51 votes," Boren says. "The group will be pulled inextricably leftward, and the Mitchell bill is flawed beyond repair." Translation: The mainstream group is George Mitchell's and Ted Kennedy's and the Clintons' last best hope of keeping this train from running off a track and over the cliff.

Professor Friedrich Hayek, the late, great, Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher of freedom, lectured on what he called the "fatal conceit" of socialism. By this useful term, Hayek meant to warn of the danger posed by government planners, convinced of their ability to plan the lives of millions of individuals better than those free individuals could choose for themselves in the marketplace. To his everlasting credit, David Boren is today issuing the same sort of warning in the health care debate. Mainstream moderates should take heed.

Meanwhile, if any remaining human being doubted that the health care emperor has no clothes, veteran West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd gave the game away. Sen. Byrd, who is to deficit spending what Typhoid Mary was to the rapid spread of disease, delivered what is, for him, an astonishing declaration. Declaring this year's health care debate to be "one of the most discouraging of my political career," Byrd said, "It is essential that we not enact a plan that squanders our last real remaining chance for significant deficit reduction." Continued Sen. Byrd, who preceded Sen. Mitchell as Senate Democratic leader, "Our national heart may be large, but our pocketbook, sadly, is quite small."

Bob Byrd arrived in the Senate in 1958, a young man swept in by the Democratic landslide triggered by the recession of that year. Through six six-year terms, he has lustily cheered on every expansion of big government and its failed liberal welfare state. In recent years he has singlehandedly blocked a balanced budget amendment, and if he ever criticized a Great Society program (much less voted against one), such criticism went unrecorded. For Sen. Byrd to make such a declaration about the unaffordability of a Democratic health care scheme is rather as though Hermann Goering, in 1940, had denounced his fuehrer's Wehrmacht.

Listen carefully to Bob Byrd. In his words you can hear the authentic death rattle of American liberalism together with all its grandiose plans for more control over our lives. Hillary Clinton, call your office.

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