A Triumph of Misinformation
James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1995
By the time the Clinton health-care-reform plan was abandoned, in September, everyone knew how terrible it was. It had been hatched in secret by an egghead team that knew a lot about policy details but had no grasp of political reality. The Administration had wasted time and missed deadline after deadline for presenting the plan to Congress, causing the plan to miss its best opportunity for passage- during the President's brief honeymoon period, in 1993. The scheme was fatally overcomplicated. The proposed legislation, 1,342 pages long, was hard for congressmen to read and impossible for anyone except the plan's creators, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira C. Magaziner, to understand.
The Clinton plan would have imposed sweeping changes on one seventh of the national economy, with consequences far greater than Congress could possibly consider before casting a rushed vote. It represented a regulation-minded, top-down, centralized approach at a time when the world was moving toward decentralization and flexibilityand when the supposed health crisis was solving itself anyway. The more people learned about this plan, the less they liked it, and it finally died a natural and well-deserved death.
Or so goes the conventional wisdom, as relayed in countless newspaper and magazine postmortems of the health-care struggle. The critiques were usually accompanied by veiled jabs at Hillary Clintonwhat will she do with her time now that health care's gone?and outright ridicule of Magaziner, who was portrayed as the smartest person with the dumbest plan since Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.
But suppose that what everyone knows is wrong. This happens all the time in politics. Barely a year ago, for example, everyone in Washington knew that Congress was absolutely certain to pass a health-care program by now. The leaders of the Administration's health-care-reform effort, Hillary Clinton and Magaziner, believe that everyone is wrong again now. I heard them elaborate this view in September and October, during a series of long background conversations. "Background" means that I agreed to check with them on any material I wanted to quote directly. The gist of their views, however, was on the record. It is no surprise that they view the reform plan as something other than an overcomplicated bureaucratic nightmare. The surprise is how much more convincing their version of reality is than the prevailing one.
