Clinton plan takes shape, but financing still big unknown.

Abstract

Global budgets...managed competition...price controls. Many of their features have filled in as Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care reform task force wraps up its work--six weeks late and counting. Based on the numerous details that have come out in the past few months, Health Care Reform Week has assembled the following round-up of provisions likely to be included in the coming reform plan. The information in based on HCR Week's interviews with government officials and industry representatives plus recent news accounts and statements by Clinton administration and congressional officials. One certainty is that whatever is in the plan President Clinton sends to Congress, legislators' approval will be heavily influenced by the proposals' cost feasibility. Advocates of the largest possible range of benefits in the health care package, for example [HCRW Special Report, 5/17/93], already are hearing from skeptical lawmakers. New benefits are "fine so long as we are willing to do one thing: pay for them. And pay for them now," says House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.). "There's been a long, unhappy record in this town of paying for today's benefits with tomorrow's dollars." Here's a wrap up of what's come out to date.