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The New
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July 12, 2000, Wednesday, Late Edition -
Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column
3; National Desk
LENGTH: 539 words
HEADLINE: THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE VICE PRESIDENT;
Gore Prods Bush and Congress on Patients' Bill of Rights
BYLINE: By MELINDA HENNEBERGER
DATELINE: LITTLE ROCK, Ark., July 11
BODY:
Vice President Al Gore prodded his Republican
opponent, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, today to get behind a bipartisan
patients' bill of rights now before Congress.
"It's
time for Governor Bush to show us whose side he is on," said the vice president,
speaking at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where his campaign
aides had set up several boxes of the game Operation that they labeled "Bush's
Health Plan."
Mr. Gore was introduced by a surgeon who told of a patient
who had lost her breast unnecessarily because her insurance company had refused
to pay for an M.R.I. test that would have shown that her cancer was localized
and could have been treated with a lumpectomy and radiation instead of a
mastectomy.
The crowd cheered as the vice president criticized a
Republican alternative to the bill.
"That's an old trick," Mr. Gore
said. "Stick a feather in your hat and call it macaroni."
The vice
president was also harshly critical of insurance companies that offer bonuses to
doctors each time they decline to refer patients to a specialist.
The
current system, Mr. Gore said, not only hurts patients but puts doctors in the
position of being forced to "play games" with the truth in dealing with
insurance companies in order to be true to the Hippocratic oath.
"It's
time to give these medical decisions back to the doctors," the vice president
said. "We have got to rise up and demand the leaders of this
do-nothing-for-people Congress put the people first for a change."
The
bipartisan bill, introduced by Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan
Democrat, and Representative Charlie Norwood, a Georgia Republican, has passed
the House and appears to be gaining support in the Senate.
In a
statement, the Bush campaign answered that Mr. Gore was "continuing his "I'm not
a leader tour' " and "attempting to shift blame for the lack" of patient
protections.
Gov. Bush has signed a patient protection bill into law in
Texas after initially fighting another version of the bill.
On NBC's
"Today" show in New York, where the vice president began the day, Mr. Gore
corrected Katie Couric when she said he had been "assailing" Mr. Bush on the
issue. "I'm not assailing him personally, Katie."
Then he went on to say
Mr. Bush, as the de facto head of the party, was, along with Republican
Congressional leaders, beholden to drug companies who opposed meaningful patient
protections or prescription drug benefits.
"I talked to a woman in
Missouri last week who has to eat macaroni and cheese every day" so she can
afford her medications, he said.
After the show, Mr. Gore worked the
crowd outside Rockefeller Center, where he competed for attention with the
"Today" weatherman, Al Roker, who complained that he was losing his audience.
While Mr. Gore shook hands and made funny faces at a couple of babies,
he heard more complaints over the loudspeaker. Inside the studio, another guest,
the television judge Judy Sheindlin, was irate that the green room had been
"taken over" by Mr. Gore.
"I think the vice president ought to get me a
muffin," she said. "I think he ought to get me a dozen muffins if he wants my
vote."
Mr. Gore later got down on one knee to serve Her Honor a muffin.
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GRAPHIC:
Photo: Vice President Al Gore addressed students and faculty of the University
of Arkansas for Medical Science in Little Rock, Ark., yesterday and criticized
what he called a Republican "do-nothing-for-people Congress." (Agence
France-Presse)
LOAD-DATE: July 12, 2000