At last, all the details are on paper. To be exact, on 1,342 pages of paper that President Clinton hand-carried to Capitol Hill. Congressman Pete Stark, a California Democrat, said the next day that he had "stayed up to 4 a.m. but couldn't finish getting through" the proposed Health Security Act he had agreed to co-sponsor. Clinton himself rather plaintively told a Baltimore audience that "my brain aches" from studying the details of his own plan.
Even members of the Cabinet seemed a bit addled. On the morning Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala told a Senate committee the...