
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 27, 1993                   TAG: 9310270170
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HEALTH SAVINGS LOWERED

President Clinton's health reform proposal will fall $33 billion short of the budget savings predicted, an administration official said Tuesday as the White House readied the plan for delivery to Congress.

The president and Hillary Rodham Clinton were to bring the 1,300-page bill to Congress in person today, five weeks after the president's initial pitch.

Clinton has argued that without a sharp slowdown in health inflation, the federal deficit would spiral back up in this decade. But his economic advisers had pledged to sacrifice further deficit reduction before raising taxes any more for health reform.

In the original draft, Clinton's health plan would have lowered the deficit by $91 billion between now and the year 2000. Budget Director Leon Panetta said the deficit-reduction figure now is $58 billion.

In addition, the latest version pushes back by a year - to the end of 1998 - the deadline to guarantee coverage for all Americans and legal residents.

One reason for the lower deficit-reduction figure was that the White House added a 15 percent cushion to its pool of subsidies to help small businesses and low-income workers buy insurance, officials said. In addition, expected Medicaid savings originally pegged at $114 billion were reduced to $65 billion.

Hillary Rodham Clinton went to Capitol Hill with Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen to brief Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on the plan. She said on network news shows that the more people know about the plan, "the better they're going to like it."

Other administration officials said the revised plan will offer discounted coverage to some small businesses with as many as 75 workers. The cutoff had been 50 workers in the original plan.

And a government takeover of employers' costs of providing health benefits for early retirees ages 55 to 64 will be phased in slowly between 1998 and 2001, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In another change, the White House has backed down from its goal of reserving half of all residencies for doctors training in primary care, not as specialists, in five years. Instead, it aims to have 55 percent of the residents in primary care by the year 2002.

The revised plan also will cover dental treatment as well as preventive dental services for children, and emergency dental care for adults.

by CNB