A Push-firm universal coverage
In a drive to stir up public enthusiasm for President Clinton health plan cabinet members fanned for the country today to preach the gospel of the universal.
To guide, single-minded staff, White House officials distributed a memorandum to cabinet members to stress why it was important, most of them participate in health activities in a single day.
“Our goal is to coordinate a critical mass of activities which demonstrate progress, commitment and dynamism,” he said. The appeal, the memorandum stresses in capital letters, is “universal coverage. Universal insurance. Universal coverage. “Importance of South Dakota
This was the message that Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, placed here to the plains of South Dakota. “Frankly, if we are not health care for all human beings in states like South Dakota, USA as South Dakota will not survive,” she says patients and employees of the Health Care Clinic, a small store front operations McKennan sponsored by the hospital. “The health reform, it is not Washington or New York. These are places such as this.”
A similar mantra was repeated by Jesse Brown, the Secretary-General pf Veterans Affairs, the University of Illinois, secretary general of Transport F. Federico Pena in the West Side clinic in St. Paul, Minister of Defense William J. Perry in the Navy National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.; Commerce Ronald H. Brown, secretary general of Loral in federal systems, a military contractor in Gaithersburg, Md.; Mike Espy Secretary General of agriculture in the Civic Center, Wheeling, W.Va., and a director of environmental protection, Carol M. Browner, the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington.
Almost a dozen other senior officials of the hotel demonstrations around the earth and other concerts are planned for later in the week.
Officials of the hotel said cheerleading was a key element in efforts to convince reluctant members of Congress, that the mood for the general public guaranteed health insurance for all Americans. To be sure, the most prominent supporters of the plan, the president and his wife, Hillary, do not participate because she perch on a week’s trip to Europe.
The events in small towns and large cities were chosen because of deadline, which coincides with the fourth congress of July spot and the conclusion of the action last week of four committees for health care legislation. The hotel has the cabinet from time to time, including health care, but with mixed results. “One Last Push”
At Charlotte, NC, M. Fernando Torres-Gil, an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, she never wanted the dynamics on Capitol Hill. “Never before in the history of this country, we’re so close to accomplishing our goals,” he said. Mr. Pena echoed those statements. At the heart of St. Paul’s Hispanic community, he said: “We have only this one last push. We are where we want to be. ”
In Chicago Brown Veterans Secretary-General said that without the Clinton plan, “thousands of Americans remain in social spending to cover their health.”
In Kankakee, Ill., in the Chamber of Commerce, Elaine Weiss, a regional director of the Department of Health and Human Services, reiterated today the question: “The middle class, the people up and go to their workplace, to lose if we do not achieve the health reform and universal. ”
At Providence Hospital in Washington, the deputy secretary general of treasury Roger C. Altman assured that employees of red tape, problems are solved with the Clinton plan. “If health was a business, long ago, it would be wound up,” he said. “But we did so that the effectiveness of hospitals prosper and the poor are not.”
Besides emergency Boston City Hospital, Philip W. Johnston, a regional director of the Department of Health and Human Services, says that Harry Truman was the first president in charge of universal coverage. He read a letter in which Truman responded to a critic, “I am just trying to resolve so that people living in the incomes of middle class can live as long as the very rich live in this country.