Health Care.

Throughout much of the 1990s, health care was a political issue. Calls for reform came from across the political spectrum. Although most people agreed that something needed to be done to hold down spiraling costs and to provide better health care coverage for the uninsured, there was no agreement on how reform might be implemented. In 1990 the bipartisan Pepper Commission proposed creating two new programs to address the crisis. One program would have provided basic health insurance to those currently uninsured. Employer mandates would have required employers to either provide health insurance for their employees or to pay into a government fund to provide the insurance. Another program would have underwritten the costs of long-term care. The annual cost of the two programs was estimated at $66.2 billion. Neither program, however, was passed into law. A revised reconciliation budget was passed and signed...