Tales From the Crypt

White House documents made public last week suggest that the Clinton health- care plan was in trouble from the start, even in the eyes of its designers. In a search for hidden clues about what went wrong, a team of TIME correspondents spent more than 100 hours sifting through 250 boxes of papers, memos and other documents created by Ira Magaziner's secretive health-care working group. Some highlights:

The Start-Up Memo. Magaziner, the reform architect, knew reform would be an uphill struggle. In his initial memo to Mrs. Clinton, dated Jan. 26, 1993, he listed "likely criticisms" that the plan would generate: "Cost containment would be ineffective and have perverse results . . . Limiting spending on health-care through global budgets will lead to service rationing, and interfere with quality improvements and consumers' traditional freedom to spend . . . Universal coverage would involve redistribution of income and disrupt satisfactory arrangements for many Americans." To this Magaziner added an ironic warning to himself, which he apparently would forget: "The task force should plan serious outreach activities. The policy work cannot be done in a vacuum."

The Land-Mines Memo. Magaziner was fond of listing the many political obstacles the plan would face in Congress. In early 1993 a memo, entitled simply "Landmines," fully anticipated the most potent arguments made against the plan. The employer mandate, the memo noted, would be criticized for "destroying jobs, driving many small companies into bankruptcy, fueling inflation, compromising competitiveness and forcing people to buy insurance when they may not want to do so." Similarly, it warned, the plan to create health-care alliances would be attacked as a "poor people's pool" and likened to "another layer of government bureaucracy interfering with the market." The guaranteed-benefits package, the memo warned, would be dismissed as "an unaffordable Cadillac."

The Ukockis Papers. Few of the documents are as revealing of the process that produced the Clinton plan as the memos of James Ukockis, a senior economist at the Treasury Department's Office of Policy Analysis. Ukockis assisted Magaziner in analyzing proposals for cost control -- when he could. On Feb. 22, 1993, after briefing Magaziner on various cost-control proposals, Ukockis recalled that Magaziner "was not interested in a balanced evaluation . . . What he wanted was for someone to make the best possible case for a specific price-control program."

At times, task-force work bordered on the absurd. On March 16 he recalled that amid the frantic pace, Magaziner sent a memo to group leaders noting that 5,000 letters were arriving daily. "We need your help," Magaziner wrote. "Our goal is to answer this mail before our May deadline." On April 2, 1993, after being asked for details of savings from various price-control proposals, Ukockis participated in another silly session. "We sat around the table making guesstimates of the savings to be realized. It was an appropriate exercise for April Fools' Day."

The Straight-Talk Directive. In June 1993, Bob Boorstin, the task-force spokesman, urged colleagues to use plain language when explaining the plan. "The public cares less about the mechanics of ((health-care reform)), and when you talk to them, they want to know in English what will happen to them. Talk to them less like Ira," Boorstin advised, "and more like Roseanne."