Clinton Health Care Draft Expensive Presidential Task Force Spent $13.8 Million On Plan

The Clinton administration’s ill-fated health care reform plan cost nearly $14 million to draft, a sum that dwarfs the original White House price tag of less than $100,000, congressional auditors said Thursday.

Costs for the 12-member President’s Task Force on Health Care Reform, which first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton oversaw, were spread across 10 agencies and totaled $13.8 million, the General Accounting Office said in a report.

More than half that amount, $7.7 million, was spent between June and November 1993 when the White House was writing a 1,342-page bill to encompass the reforms it had settled on, according to the report by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Clinton bill was almost immediately discarded by Congress, as various committees drafted their own plans and then feuded over which version should be voted on.

Congress abandoned the effort in late 1994 in a major blow to President Clinton’s ambitious agenda.

Since then, the administration has been admonished that writing its own legislation was a costly waste of time and an infringement on a duty normally reserved for Congress.

Rep. William Clinger, R-Pa., chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, said the discrepancy between the original cost estimates and the final price tag was “another example of the Clinton administration not being forthcoming with the Congress and the American people.”

The White House said the total cost for the task force “paled in comparison” to what opponents of the health care plan spent trying to defeat it.

“The magnitude of the task was great, and the overall cost in comparison is relatively modest,” spokeswoman Ginny Terzano said. She said that despite the low estimates it was “never our intent to mislead or misreport” the true costs of the effort.

The White House said it had never tried in its estimates to compile a government-wide cost figure for the health care reform effort, and never claimed to have done so. The GAO was the first to calculate such a figure.

The task force’s original charter, submitted in March 1993, stated that its final cost “is expected to be below $100,000.”

In testimony before Congress in 1994, White House aide Patsy Thomasson gave a higher figure of about $211,000.

But signs quickly emerged that the figure was far too low.

The Associated Press reported in February that records it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed the administration paid hundreds of thousand of dollars in consulting fees to advisers who assisted the task force.

Some of those advisers with political connections to the Clintons were paid as much as $100,000 each.

A month later, the GAO announced a preliminary study had found as much as $9.6 million in expenditures.