Hillary Clinton learned 'hard lesson' on health care, she wrote to Moynihan

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL

DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Wednesday, April 16th 2008, 4:00 AM

Dharapak/AP

Hillary Clinton campaigns at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Washington Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton has long admitted to bungling universal health care in 1994, but a never-before-seen note she penned to the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan reveals how deeply she thought the failure hurt her — and the nation.

"If
I had listened to you about health care in 1994, I would be far better
off today - but more importantly - so would the nation's health care
system," Clinton wrote Moynihan in October 2000, near the end of her New York Senate campaign to succeed the retiring Moynihan.

It
was a confession in which the former First Lady seemed to acknowledge
that - if not for her refusal to listen to congressional leaders in her
own party like Moynihan - millions more Americans would likely have
become insured.

"All I can tell you is I learned my lessons the
hard way, which makes them indelible," Clinton said in the handwritten
note, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily News.

Accepting
blame for the 1994 health care debacle is nothing new for Clinton,
especially lately, as she is again promising to provide health
insurance to all Americans as a candidate for President.

"If
you don't learn from your mistakes, you stop growing," the presidential
hopeful said last September as she unveiled her new health care plan,
which she has promised would be debated more openly than the
closed-door process she oversaw as First Lady in 1993 and 1994.

But her private note to Moynihan seemed to cast her failure, and its cost to the nation, in starker terms.

Back in 1994, Moynihan was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee,
and brokered a bipartisan bill that would have cut the number of
uninsured Americans in half - to roughly 20 million from 40 million.

But the Clintons refused to consider anything but 100% coverage, killing any chance of a compromise, said David Podoff, a former Senate Finance Committee economist who was intimately involved in negotiations.

"It was an opportunity lost," said Podoff, now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Since then, the problem has only gotten worse, with some 46 million Americans uninsured, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Despite
their rift, Moynihan backed Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign. However,
the senator's widow, Liz, is now backing Clinton rival Barack Obama for President.

Clinton
now argues her current health care plan is superior to one offered by
Obama because it would be a surer path to universal coverage.