What Hillary Has Learned from '93

Viewpoint: Joe Klein takes a look at Clinton's health care plan, and finds — lo and behold — that this is one with a chance to work

Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks about her health care policy at Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa.

Back in 1993, when Hillary Clinton first tried to reform the nation's health-insurance system, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the difficulty of getting such a gargantuan bill passed: "The Senate has its own peculiar ecology," he told me. "Something like this passes with 75 votes or not at all." Moynihan was then chairman of the Finance Committee, the Senate's natural choke point for big social-engineering schemes. He was worried that the Clintons, especially the First Lady, were being stubborn, trying to jam their bill through with a bare majority rather than build a bipartisan consensus. At the end...

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