Doctor world

President Barack Obama's campaign for a health care overhaul is an intense installment in a long-running story
The basic issue, affordable health care for all Americans, has not changed. But possible solutions have not evolved either, in part because new proposals seldom build on old ones. Obama's broad, leave-the-details-to-Congress proposal has little in common with the 1,300-page measure President Bill Clinton couldn't even get to a vote in a Democratic Senate in 1993.

The Obama strategy was designed to avoid mistakes Clinton made in confronting Congress with a massive bill written in the White House under the management of Hillary Rodham Clinton and essentially telling the House and Senate to take it or leave it. Clinton threatened to veto any bill that did not deliver universal health care. He got nothing to veto.