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Clinton revisits health

Campaign-style effort on care reform focuses on what she calls Bush's failures on Medicare program

BY GLENN THRUSH | WASHINGTON BUREAU

January 24, 2006

Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Saratoga Pharmacy in Rochester, N.Y., where she criticized President Bush's Medicare prescription drug program. (AP Photo / January 23, 2006)

ROCHESTER - Twelve years after her attempt to provide coverage to all Americans went down in flames, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she's jumping "back into the fray" of health care reform to publicize the Bush administration's failures.

Barnstorming through Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse yesterday, Clinton hosted the first of several health care forums geared at hearing constituents' complaints and exploring alternative systems.

The first installment was anything but parochial, with Clinton launching a campaign-style attack on the White House for the glitch-plagued Medicare prescription program, skyrocketing health insurance premiums and increased co-payments for poor families covered by Medicaid.

"It may be that 12 years ago, we tried to do too much too fast, but I think today we're making things worse with deliberate neglect and flawed policies that are diminishing the coverage that Americans have," Clinton said during a forum at Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital.

"I'm ready to get back into the fray, knowing how difficult and controversial it is," added Clinton, who has no immediate plans to introduce another ambitious program of her own.

The tour came after a busy week of concerted Bush battering by the presumptive Democratic front-runner. On Martin Luther King Day, Clinton decried the Bush White House as one of the worst ever and likened the GOP's domination of Capitol Hill to that of slave owners running a plantation.

"Does Hillary Clinton really want to talk about health care?" said Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. "The American people were pretty clear in rejecting a program that would have cost hard-working taxpayers billions of dollars."

Speaking at a Buffalo drug store, Clinton defended the plantation remark as an accurate description of House Republicans' "top-down attitude that I don't think is good for the country."

At a later appearance at Rochester's Saratoga Pharmacy, Clinton listened to patients describe problems getting payments for medication. Miscommunication and technical problems have plagued the new Medicare D system, especially for the 6 million Medicaid recipients shifted to Medicare on Jan. 1.

"You call Medicare? Good luck!" said Rose Fitts, a Rochester senior who was automatically enrolled in the new program from Medicaid. "If you do get through, they are more confused, it seems, than I am."

Clinton, who has cosponsored a bill to reimburse states like New York that are paying for patients who fall through the cracks, said that she would scrap the program and "start over" if given the choice.

By mid-afternoon, Clinton's campaign had sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to send in their own health care horror stories for use in the future.

In January 1993, then-first lady Hillary Clinton was appointed to chair her husband's health care reform commission, but the effort collapsed a year later.