Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York, NY)
November 9, 1999, Tuesday ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: NEWS; Page A18
LENGTH: 400 words
HEADLINE:
BRADLEY NEEDLES GORE WITH HEALTH PLANS
BYLINE: THE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BODY:
Washington-In a
sign of the potency of the health care issue in the Democratic presidential
race, Bill Bradley threw his sharpest elbow yet at Al Gore yesterday,
questioning the vice president's loyalty to "fundamental Democratic principle"
as each candidate issued yet another health wish list.
The vice
president, making a campaign stop at Center Pharmacy in Washington, proposed
several measures to speed cheaper generic drugs to market. He
called for legislation to make it harder for drug companies to
get extensions on drug patents, which delay
the ability of other companies to market generic versions of the
drugs.
Bradley, speaking to the American Public Health
Association in Chicago, outlined how he would spend an additional $ 2 billion
each year on public health. But the former New Jersey senator also likened the
attacks on his $ 65-billion health plan by Gore to the "political opportunism of
Newt Gingrich" and congressional Republicans that brought down the 1993
Clinton-Gore proposal for universal health insurance.
"I can't say that
the solution they came up with was exactly right but they were on to the
problem," said Bradley, who has proposed eliminating Medicaid and offering
insurance premium subsidies to get health coverage to 95 percent of Americans.
Using the "stay and fight" phrase that Gore has used to slap Bradley for
leaving the Senate, Bradley continued: "In the case of health care, Al Gore
decided it wasn't worth standing and fighting. He abandoned that fundamental
Democratic principle of basic health care for all Americans he had talked about
so much in the campaign of 1992." Gore called Bradley's "a flawed
trillion-dollar plan that will cost the American people even more in the long
run." He again challenged Bradley - "How about it, Bill?" - to a debate on
health care while his aides trumpeted a re-evaluation of Bradley's health plan
released yesterday by Emory University professor Kenneth E. Thorpe.
Thorpe, whose first 10-year cost estimate of $ 1.2 trillion created a
brouhaha, reduced the figure by $ 142 billion but maintained yesterday that
Bradley's plan would give health coverage to 89 percent of the uninsured
population - not 95 percent, as Bradley insists.
Bradley spokeswoman
Kristen Ludecke dismissed Thorpe, a former Clinton-Gore administration official,
as a Gore partisan and his analysis as "not credible."
LOAD-DATE: November 9, 1999 
