ns spent. As one doctor described the status quo of the U.S. health care system in a report to the White House Domestic Policy Council:
This system is broken and desperately needs to be fixed... If I were talking about this as a patient, I would say that it is in intensive care and we're not seeing the kind of vital signs that would lead us to believe it will recover.
As a consequence, in 1992 both major political parties advocated health care reform; industry demanded it become cost-effective; individuals wanted it made accessible and affordable. With such a consensus, one would think that in the two years since 1992 major strides would have been made toward "fixing" the system. Instead, for the 1994 election year, partisan politics made health care reform a point of division. The two-year effort of President Bill Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to develop on behalf of the President a comprehensive plan for health care reform was shot down in a hail of criticism and competing plans sporting such names as "Clinton Lite" and "Congressional Alternative to Tax and Spend." Even before the White House plan was unveiled early this year, Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole announced "There isn't any crisis in American health care.
Politicians do not deserve all of the blame for muddying the issue, though. The public's foresight is short-lived: as the United States economy improved between '92 and '94, financial pressures on health care consumers eased from other directions; health care reform was not taken as seriously once the pocketbook incentive was less pressing. Thus, the pattern of neglect and politization that has characterized American health care debate continues:
The reasons some people in the United States have virtually unlimited health care while others get little are tied to our national character. Perhaps if we'd had a major cholera epidemic 150 years ago in our urban slums (as did Europe) that cla...