President and Hillary Rodham Clinton are beginning a two-week push to try to convince senior citizens that the White House strategy is the best medicine for the nation's health-care ills.
The president's speech Wednesday to an elderly crowd at Edison, N.J., marks the latest attempt by the White House to focus its health-care campaign on a specific audience or issue. In the previous two weeks, Clinton and his aides pounded home the same theme: The nation's health-care system is in crisis."We think one of the really strong parts of the president's health-care plan is how we treat seniors - things we do with drugs and long-term care," White House spokesman Jeff Eller said. "We also know we're better when we concentrate on one thing."
Hillary Clinton renewed her attacks on the health insurance industry Tuesday. "We have to change the insurance market and the way it operates," she told the American Legion.
The first lady also renewed her attack on the Health Insurance Association of America's television ads that criticize the Clinton plan and its mandatory insurance-purchasing alliances.
"You know these television advertisements that they've spent about $20 million on saying that we're going to take away your choice? Well, that's just flat untrue," she said.
The president's one-day trip comes amid pressure to drop or scale back his proposal that the government assume companies' cost of health-care coverage for early retirees. Eliminating that provision - a favorite of Hillary Clinton and some major companies - could save more than half of the increase in the deficit that the Congressional Budget Office predicted would come from Clinton's health-care plan.
Under Clinton's plan, doctors would not be able to charge senior citizens more than Medicare's reimbursement rate. It also would expand access to long-term care and provide partial prescription drug coverage, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said.