HICAGO - Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley said yesterday that rival Al Gore was too timid on health care and should have continued to push for coverage for all Americans after the Clinton administration's effort to accomplish that failed.
Addressing the American Public Health Association's annual meeting, Bradley also proposed creating a new federal institute to study what makes communities healthy.
The former senator from New Jersey suggested that the vice president, who once insisted that universal health care was necessary, had backed down after listening to Washington insiders instead of the American people.
''In the case of health care, Al Gore decided it wasn't worth standing and fighting,'' Bradley said, using the ''stay and fight'' phrase that Gore has used to criticize his rival for leaving the Senate at the end of his third term in January 1997.
Bradley said Gore and President Clinton were right to push for universal health care after they took office in 1993. But he blamed special interests, Republicans, and a large national deficit for its defeat.
The improved economy and budget surplus make it a good time to try again, he said.
''The lesson Al Gore learned from the health care defeat was that big, bold things can't get done in Washington, so let's look to the small, symbolic things. But that was the wrong lesson,'' Bradley said.
Gore's spokesman, Chris Lehane, said Bradley was acting like a ''typical politician.''
Gore has proposed insuring all children by 2005 by giving states more money to provide coverage. Families with incomes above a certain level could buy into the state program.
Bradley would give subsidies to the poor to buy into private insurance or opt into an expanded federal system. He also would require parents to insure their newborns.
Meanwhile, Bradley proposed a new Institute of Community-based Public Health Sciences at the National Institutes of Health to determine what makes communities healthy and how to implement changes.
