Clinton's dying plan.

Michael Barone, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report, adds his voice to a quite general clamor against the excesses and misjudgments of Hillary Clinton. He complains about her bad judgment in endorsing a health plan the axes of which slip from the memory an hour or two after a sweaty session devoted to mastering them. Then Mr. Barone says almost in passing that there isn't any way the Clinton health plan is going to get through Congress. Under the circumstances the whole thing is a great dissipation of political and analytical energy, serving no purpose save to remind us all that improvements should be made. But one wonders that this was necessary. A snowfall over your driveway should be enough to remind you to remove the snow.

The political insiders are consoling themselves, indeed congratulating themselves, by saying that even though the Clinton program will not pass, something will pass, and the voting public will think of Mr. Clinton as responsible for it. This is entirely possible--people go around congratulating Clinton on ending the recession. But in the matter of health, the one great reform that is needed is not in prospect. It is to do away with all employer contributions to health care and let the money now going from management to insurer go instead from management to insured. That is the key to true progress. But even under the constraints of the crazy management-insurance arrangement, progress has been made simply by the exercise of a little native ingenuity.

The people at Forbes have been sending out a package calling attention to their own experience, chronicled in the Reader's Digest last October. The Forbes Plan was orchestrated before Mr. Clinton was nominated for President, which makes it difficult for people who praise it or, better, emulate it, to give Mr. Clinton the credit.

It is this simple. Along around 1990, the Forbes Company studied the rising cost of health insurance for its few hundred employees and decided something had to be done. It turned to its employees and said: If you submit medical/dental claims at the end of a year that are less than $600, we'll match the saving. For instance, John submits $400 in claims in a year, which is to say, $200 less than the limit. So Forbes gives him a bonus check for twice the saving, or $400. That is a wonderfully good incentive not to spend needlessly on medicine.

How can Forbes do this? It is of course as simple as that the insurance company now finds itself facing diminished claims, rather than increased claims, and reduces the cost of its insurance to Forbes. Instead of the anticipated 20 per cent rise in insurance costs, after the first year, Forbes's premiums were down 2 per cent. And many Forbes employees are enjoying the fruit of their own husbandry, which is as it ought to be.

The Forbes plan is of course one of myriad designs that a free society can exfoliate to provide what is everywhere desired, a decrease in the cost of medical overhead. The problem of the uninsured needs to be treated empirically, and indeed is already being treated incrementally. Last year the per-capita expenditure on medicine for those who had insurance was $1,400. The per-capita expenditure on those who did not have insurance was--S900. If there are 37 million uninsured--that is the figure we all hear, though every now and then Mr. Clinton expands it, as he most recently did, to 57 million--where is the money coming from? We are talking about more than $30 billion.

What the public is yearning for isn't so much the universalization of health care as it is the security that comes from portability: coverage that sticks with you like a birthmark, from job to job, in sickness and in health. The notion that the way to provide this is to have presidentially appointed bureaucrats preside like the college of cardinals over mother health tells us nothing more than that statism continues to be the major tropism of Democratic policy wonks. Universalize the savings Forbes has engineered, go one step better and let the employee buy his own insurance with pre-tax dollars, specifying his own deductible, and the problem dies of atrophy. (Universal Press Syndicate)