Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 3, 1995 TAG: 9507030105
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: NASHVILLE, TENN. LENGTH: Medium
And the dose comes from a striking source - the nation's leading anti-abortion group, which in recent years has become one of the Republican party's most reliable sources of support.
Warning that certain Republican proposals for reforming Medicare could lead to ``involuntary euthanasia'' of the poor, the old and the mentally disabled, leaders of the National Right to Life Committee urged their members at the organization's convention in Nashville over the weekend to ``sound the Klaxon of alarm'' over proposed ``managed care'' health reforms.
Last year, the National Right to Life Committee used its formidable lobbying and grass-roots organizing apparatus to help GOP leaders defeat the Clinton administration's health reform plan. Now, Right to Life Executive Director David O'Steen has urged activists to unleash the same tactics on Republican legislators who have embraced managed health care as a key way to reduce projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid by estimated $288 billion between now and 2002.
That call could presage a massive, and until now largely unheralded, collision between the central goal of the new Republican majority in Congress - balancing the budget - and the core beliefs of anti-abortion activists. Reducing the rapid growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending is a crucial element of all proposed plans to balance the budget, and nearly all proposals to reduce those costs rely, to one extent or another, on some form of managed care.
Many of the nation's elderly are at risk of being labeled economically unviable as society turns to various forms of ``rationing,'' Dr. Carolyn Gerster, the right-to-life committee's vice president for international affairs, and her colleagues contend.
The potential conflict between right-to-life activists and the Republican leadership may come as a surprise to outsiders, accustomed to labeling abortion opponents as reliably ``conservative'' political players. But the two groups already have clashed over welfare reform, with anti-abortion activists arguing that proposed limits on payments to mothers could lead poor women to have abortions rather than additional children. Activists interviewed here say that on health care, too, the bottom line for them is not about a budget.
Many Right to Life Committee members, says Gerster, ``are social conservatives but not fiscal conservatives. We think anyone who needs health care should be able to get it.''
Right to Life Committee leaders admit that because of the intricacy of health issues, this new front is a dangerous one for their organization. Rank-and-file members who are passionate about abortion may not easily grasp the effort to fight on the other end of what the group's leaders call the ``life spectrum.''
O'Steen says the group is standing for principle. The Right to Life Committee's goals cannot be defined as liberal or conservative, but only as ``life or death,'' he says - an assertion that defies conventional wisdom and leads quickly into complicated ethical, philosophical and political turf.
The battle, as Right to Life Committee members see it, is on behalf of the helpless - people who would otherwise be crushed as mere obstacles by a society stampeding along in reckless self-indulgence. Their language echoes both social conservatives' rhetoric about the nation's moral decline and the left's traditional defense of ``the marginalized.''
by CNB