Hillary, Gingrich team up to push health-care reforms

WASHINGTON — What a difference a few years make.

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the face of the relatively new Clinton administration's attempt to push a health-care-policy overhaul in the early 1990s, found Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican in the House at the time, as her adamant foe.

But there, standing together Thursday, were Clinton and Gingrich. Now a U.S. senator from New York, she joined Gingrich, an ex-House speaker and leader of the GOP's 1994 "Contract With America," to push an array of health-care reforms they said should be adopted by the government and private insurers.

Clinton and Gingrich said they want to put partisanship aside to pull together a bipartisan coalition for cost-saving and lifesaving health-care legislation.

"My hope and my sense is we may be at the end of a 40-year cycle of bitterness," said Gingrich, who led the successful 1994 Republican effort to take control of the House.

The political odd couple first spoke out publicly together in May in calling for legislation that would modernize health records into databanks that could be accessed quickly in an emergency. Since that eyebrow-raising effort, the pair has found some other areas of agreement on health care, an issue that has traditionally driven Republicans and Democrats far apart.

"We have the same instinct, that, you know, I've spent enough of my life fighting and it would be nice to spend some time constructing, and I think there's a feeling in the country that's very similar," Gingrich said at a "Ceasefire on Health Care" event sponsored by the drug company Pfizer Inc. and American University.

Gingrich said he now supports a key proposal that Clinton had offered more than a decade ago, when she proposed creating a single system for medical billing so that all insurers and providers would be able to use similar procedures and save time.

She compared it to the bar codes on food packages that allow grocery store clerks to quickly scan them for a price.

"I thought this was a no-brainer," Clinton said ruefully. "This one thing ignited an incredible reaction."

Even while calling for bipartisan effort, Gingrich said his conservative beliefs have not moved drastically.

"I'm not quite sure I'm ready to join the mushy middle," he said.