Vouching Toward Gore
Toward
the end of Friday's Nightline debate, after Al Gore had called Bill
Bradley's health-care proposal a "voucher" plan for the third time, Bradley
finally woke up and smelled the danger. "They're not vouchers, Al," Bradley
protested. "It is not vouchers. The health-care program doesn't have vouchers."
Two days later, in their debate on Meet the Press , Gore elaborated:
"There are 75 million Americans today who get Medicare and Medicaid. They are
all left out under Sen. Bradley's plan because he eliminates Medicaid and
replaces it with little $150-a-month vouchers." Bradley fired back immediately.
"That's wrong," he insisted. "It's not a voucher."
The
"voucher" debate represents the third and decisive stage of the Democratic
presidential contest. In the first stage, each candidate tried to put his best
issues on the agenda. Gore pushed suburban sprawl, health care, and education.
Bradley pushed gun control, health care, and campaign reform. Each man got one
of his issues on the agenda--campaign reform for Bradley, education for
Gore--plus the issue on whose importance they agreed: health care. In the
second stage, the candidates fought for the high ground on those three issues.
Gore won the high ground on education by proposing a $115 billion school aid
package while portraying Bradley as a voucher sympathizer. Bradley won the high
ground on campaign reform by offering a comprehensive reform plan while teaming
up with John McCain against a fund-raising system whose corruption McCain
helpfully traced to the Clinton-Gore White House.
The
third stage is the battle over the remaining issue: health care. Each candidate
is trying to marshal his assets on this battleground by building a thematic
bridge to it from the issue he is already winning. Bradley is trying to carry
his message of comprehensive reform from campaign finance to health care. He
proposes to replace Medicaid with subsidies that would make health insurance
affordable to more people but would require those with sufficient incomes to
pay part of their premiums out of their own pockets.
Gore,
meanwhile, is trying to carry his message of public responsibility from
education to health care. He wants to convince Democrats that Bradley, by
substituting partial subsidies for guaranteed benefits, would gut the public
health-care system as well as the public education system. If Gore succeeds in
linking the two issues this way, Bradley will lose the health-care debate, and
with it the nomination. That's why Gore has distilled this linkage to a single
word--"vouchers"--and why Bradley is fighting to extinguish that word with such
fury.
In the
context of education, Gore has defined the word "voucher" in two negative ways.
First, vouchers are a zero-sum game. As Gore sees it, every penny spent on them
comes out of funds previously allocated to a fully subsidized program.
"Experience shows there's a set amount of money that communities have been
willing to spend on education," Gore argued on Meet the Press . "If you
drain the money away from the public schools for private vouchers, then that
hurts the public schools." Second, vouchers don't cover the cost of the program
they replace. "The flaw with the voucher theory," said Gore, "is that the vast
majority of those who receive a tiny little down payment on the tuition cannot
afford the rest of it."
Having
packed these two poisonous assumptions into the word "voucher," Gore is now
injecting that poison into Bradley's health-care proposal by applying the same
word to both contexts. "Every single time vouchers came up in the Senate, Bill,
for 18 years, you voted for them. Now you're proposing vouchers in place of
Medicaid capped at $150 a month," Gore charged on Nightline . "You
canceled Medicaid and give people $150 vouchers to try to replace it. … If we
cancel Medicaid and substitute little vouchers capped at $150 dollars a month,
there's not a single plan available here in New Hampshire that you can get for
anything approximating the cap in this plan." On Meet the Press , Gore
said Bradley expects recipients of health insurance subsidies to "buy into the
federal employee benefit plan. Ninety-five percent of all the health insurance
plans that are part of [that] plan have premiums that are far in excess of $150
a month."
The
"voucher" attack has at least made Gore's ideological position coherent. For
months, Gore vacillated between calling Bradley a liberal budget-buster and
calling him a crypto-Reaganite menace to federal entitlements. Now that
question is settled: Gore will attack Bradley from the left. Gore will defend
Medicaid, the public schools, and other government-guaranteed programs. He will
accuse Bradley of threatening to replace these programs with risky and
inadequate "voucher" schemes. And he will direct this argument to specific
Democratic constituencies such as senior citizens, blacks, gays, and labor
unions.
What's
not yet clear is whether Bradley will accept this arrangement. On Meet the
Press , he challenged Gore's leftist dogma against school vouchers: "If
[voucher] experiments demonstrated that the quality of public education was
improved, does that mean that you would not even consider vouchers?" Then he
scoffed that "Al proposes an education program" that "comes from Washington."
Yet Bradley refused to cede the left to Gore. Rather than defend the idea of
substituting vouchers for government control of schools, Bradley insisted that
the two options are compatible. "Every time I voted for vouchers, I voted for
it as an experimental basis," said Bradley. "And I also said that I would not
take any public money that was set aside for schools. This would be new
money."
Similarly, Bradley refuses to defend the mildly libertarian position Gore has
assigned him on health care. Bradley could affirm that his subsidies for health
insurance don't cover the entire cost of premiums. He could argue that
individuals ought to bear responsibility for paying a portion of their
premiums. Or he could simply argue that the amount of money the government
takes from taxpayers to subsidize health care should be limited. He could, in
short, embrace and defend the idea of vouchers.
Instead, Bradley repudiates the word. On Meet the Press , he insisted
that the $150 he allots to each person's monthly insurance premium is "not a
cap. It's a weighted average." In a "Memo to National Reporters" after the
debate, Bradley's campaign drove home the point: "THE BRADLEY PLAN IS SUPPORT
FOR HEALTH INSURANCE, NOT 'VOUCHERS.' " Calling the $150 a "cost estimate," the
memo provided dictionary definitions of "subsidy" and "voucher," indicating
that vouchers are explicitly finite whereas subsidies are not. The implication
of these caveats is that if universal health insurance turns out to cost even
more than the $65 billion a year Bradley has allotted to it, the government
will tax and spend more to cover the difference.
Listening to Bradley's equivocal remarks on school vouchers, and looking at the
sliding scale of subsidies and tax breaks he proposes for health insurance, you
get the feeling he's rather sympathetic toward solutions that take account of
market dynamics. You get the feeling that this sympathy is what he's hiding
behind noncomittal words such as "cost estimates" and "weighted averages." You
wonder whether he could win a general election coming out of the right lane of
the Democratic Party. But first he has to get the Democratic nomination, a race
he has clearly decided he can't win in that lane.
In a way, it's Bradley's
fault. On firearms and campaign finance, he defined reform as government
control. He thought he could pass Gore on the left. Instead, Gore cut him
off--and now Bradley can't connect his campaign-finance crusade, under the
rubric of reform, to his challenges to existing welfare-state policies on
health and education. Every time Gore utters the word "vouchers," he's bumping
Bradley closer to the right edge of the road. It's going to be a short race if
Bradley won't bump back.
