http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page1.htmlhere is but a SMALL snippet - it is no wonder nothing has been done...
August 30, 1992 - Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller gets wind of Clinton's waning support for "pay-or-play" and fires off a memo arguing against any change of direction. He also tells Clinton that his statement that "Americans deserve or have a right to health care" might present problems for the candidate in the future. "Although many Americans may initially react positively to this statement," he writes, “over time it can make them uneasy. Before long they will be asking: How would we pay for all that care for all those people? Won't it require a huge new government bureaucracy?"
September 24, 1992 - In a speech before some two thousand employees of the Merck Pharmaceutical Co., Clinton unveils a revised version of his health reform policies. Without ever using the term "managed competition," he contrasts his approach with that of President Bush. The speech receives favorable coverage.
November 1992 - Clinton wins the election. Polls indicate that voters rank health care far behind the economy and slightly behind the budget deficit in importance. The majority of the public has only the fuzziest notion of what Clinton has in mind for health care reform.
January 25, 1993 - Clinton announces the formation of The President's Task Force on National Health Reform. The job of the task force, he says, is to "prepare health care reform legislation to be submitted to Congress within one hundred days of our taking office." He also announces that his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will head the task force and that Ira Magaziner will be named its day-to-day operating head. A blanket of secrecy is imposed on task force operations. Magaziner objects but is overruled by George Stephanopoulos and others on the White House communications team.
The appointment of the First Lady sends a clear signal to all in the administration and players in both parties on Capitol Hill that Clinton places great importance on Health Care. It also serves instantly to limit how far cabinet secretaries and White House aides can go in pressing their views. One person watching from close range will later tell Johnson and Broder: "They went about this exactly in the right way, with one exception. The person who's in charge shouldn't sleep with the President, because if you sleep with the President, nobody is going to tell you the truth." Key economic advisers who have grave reservations about the direction of Clinton's reform plans from the very start are forced to ask themselves, "Do I want to take on the President's wife?"
In order to meet their hundred-day deadline and win swift congressional passage the Clintons intend to fit the health care proposal into the presidential budget and pass it all in one gigantic package. An advantage to this strategy is that under Senate rules the reconciliation bill can be debated for only twenty-four hours before it comes to an up-or-down vote.
Early March 1993 - Sen. Robert C. Byrd, chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, and a recognized guardian of Senate procedure, blocks the Clinton reconciliation bill strategy. He is convinced the strategy amounts to a "prostitution of the process" by pushing through "a very complex, very expensive, very little understood piece of legislation."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page1.html