Word: iras
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...unworkable idea for health-care reform favored by most Democrats. Called "pay or play," the plan would have required employers to extend basic insurance to all their employees or contribute to a public trust that would provide the entitlement instead. Huddling with a brainy Rhode Island business consultant named Ira Magaziner, Reed spent several weeks souping up "pay or play" into a more ambitious- sounding plan that would use savings from cost controls and more efficient management to insure 37 million uninsured Americans...
...They were not only uncertain," recalls a Cabinet officer, "they were big. The numbers bedeviled the process all the way through." Everyone knew that the numbers belonged to Ira Magaziner, the longtime Clinton friend whose consulting work for hospitals during the 1980s earned him a place as the candidate's most trusted health-care adviser. A tall, balding man with a weakness for jargon, Magaziner seemed to live in a world with its own brand of mathematics. He contended that Clinton could cover 37 million uninsured Americans by putting controls on costs and eliminating waste. Nearly every Democratic health-care...
...time to work out the details, build consensus among the experts and lobbyists, keep skeptics at bay, generate more ideas, and test the financial assumptions on the government's supercomputers. But most of all, Magaziner needed to conduct what one task-force member called "Ira's own heuristic process. This is the way Ira decides things," the official said. "He gets as many people in a room and talks for as long as everyone can stand." Of course, to a lesser extreme, it was also the way Clinton decided things. "Managed competition was a thesis that needed to be proven...
Magaziner's eccentricity drove his colleagues to distraction. Little was committed to paper because nothing was decided with any finality. "Everything just keeps accumulating in Ira's head," said a task-force member. At one point, members pushed Magaziner to lay out the plan -- as it then stood -- in a two-page memo, but he resisted the idea, warning colleagues that too many details were leaking. In what some took as divine intervention, a flu epidemic swept through the task force in late spring, temporarily sidelining dozens of ! participants. Even Magaziner, who was bearing up better than most, caught walking...
...Clinton plan is surprisingly persuasive in supporting the longtime claim of the Clintons and their top health-care strategist, Ira Magaziner, that reform can be financed almost entirely from savings, without broad-based new taxes and with enough left over to reduce the federal budget deficit. Ever since the campaign, when Clinton first floated this claim, budget experts have derided it as a "free lunch" approach. But now the President has backed it up with tough choices on spending -- choices that might prove politically impractical or diminish the quality of health care, but which at least demonstrate his seriousness...