Gop Seeks Portable Insurance But Clinton Opposes Bill’s Medical Savings Accounts

GOP leaders pressed President Clinton again Tuesday to accept a health insurance bill that would let workers carry coverage from job to job while allowing people to stow money in controversial medical savings accounts.

“We have a real opportunity in the next day or so to reach an agreement with the Clinton administration,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich told fellow lawmakers.

But a stumbling block remained: how to operate a demonstration project to see whether Republican-backed medical savings accounts will work.

The tax-free accounts would be designed for use in paying routine medical bills of people who also buy catastrophic health insurance. Critics, including the administration, fear the accounts would siphon off healthy, affluent people from regular health insurance, thus increasing coverage costs for the sick and the poor.

In a Tuesday speech to the American Nurses Association, Clinton emphasized the main premise of the original Senate bill. “No worker should have to worry about losing health care if he or she loses a job,” he said, “and no one should be denied health care simply because they or someone in their family has a pre-existing (medical) condition.”

Stressing bipartisan support for that part of the legislation, he pointedly noted that the bill “in its purest form” - without the accounts - “passed the Senate 100 to 0.” He said he believed he and congressional leaders could devise a good bill.

To Gingrich, the medical savings accounts are essential to allow “small businesses and the self-employed to have a chance to provide a lower-cost health insurance program that will truly help people get coverage. That’s the number one effort domestically right now.”

Initially, House Republicans wanted the accounts immediately available to everyone. The White House balked. Congressional Republicans suggested a temporary “demonstration” project. The White House agreed to the idea.

Republicans offered a demonstration project Tuesday that involves the self-employed and employers with 100 or fewer workers, starting next January.