The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

But if this happens, even if you are now well-insured, you lose. Why? Because Kristol's alternative health plan, micro-reforms and repairs to the current system, does nothing to address the central questions driving health care reform: how to control costs and how to achieve universal coverage. The experience of every other major nation that has reformed its health system teaches us the two are intimately connected: That is, to control costs, we need universal coverage. Yet Kristol's provisions - the ones picked up by Dole, Gramm, and others - would only take care of one of the middle class' primary fears: that a private insurer will not insure someone with a pre-existing condition. But if the ranks of the uninsured remain vast, and if doctors and hospitals can continue to charge whatever they can get for services, prices will keep going through the roof (reaching 18 percent of GDP by 1998, if current trends hold). And before long, even moderately affluent people won't be able to afford coverage even if an insurer - in a Kristol-reformed system - will have them.

In spite of its anti-"welfare state" packaging, Kristol's plan whistles government into the game by asking it to regulate the insurance market. Kristol, however, abandoned even this minimal position when Congress was working to get a bill ready for the floors in late summer. When Gephardt and Mitchell proposed compromise measures, Kristol told Republicans to run the clock out. "At bottom this debate is now a political one," he wrote in a strategy memo on July 26. "Sight unseen, Republicans should oppose [the new Democratic bills]." (emphasis Kristol's.)

Health care is not the only place Kristol has blocked possible agreement between liberals and conservatives. On June 15, when the president introduced his long-awaited plan "to end welfare as we know it," Gingrich and Kristol were quoted in The Washington Post's news story about the plan. In opposition, of course. Hearing two Republicans denounce a plan to make welfare recipients go to work - long a staple of Reaganite rhetoric - would be mind-boggling if you didn't know that Kristol was behind the gambit, this time with Charles Murray, a leading conservative social expert.

The Kristol hallmarks were clear: A strategy memo appeared, arguing for a no-compromise line. "Republicans should not busy themselves seeking promising signs or areas of possible agreement in the president's plan," Kristol wrote on June 13. "Instead, we should make plain what this welfare proposal amounts to: marginal tinkering...."

Well, no. As Mickey Kaus argues, Clinton's plan is not without its small holes, but there are no black holes. The two-year limit on benefits before you have to go to work only begins at age 18; new mothers get a year extension after the birth of a child; states can excuse 10 percent of their pool for "good cause"; etc., etc. Sure, public employee unions broke Clinton in the drafting process, successfully inserting a clause that prohibits welfare recipients from doing work unionized government workers are already doing. Nevertheless, the limit is there in the Clinton bill - the first serious initiative in a generation to take on welfare directly.