"Jimmy Carter is a prime example--he doesn't owe anything to anybody. There aren't barons anymore, there's a huge public mass and nobody is tending the store."

Press releases on "the people's tax reform" riffled around the room, and various governors were issuing timely calls for some kind of major tax reform.

"The capacity for a negative majority against something is a very grave danger to any democracy," Beer said. "The effect of this is that we're doing nothing. We're just drifting along."

The concept of a negative majority was destined to be a recurring theme in this convention, as it has been in national discussions on issues ranging from tax reform to health insurance to nuclear power plants to school desegregation. Beer, true to his reputation as The Great Federalist, said the answer to solving the country's spending problems rested not with the prevalence of stingy conservatism or spendthrift liberalism--but in "better bureaucratic machinery to control the spending--more selective spending."

The Pitch for Nationalism

The second day of the conference, August 28, was highlighted by Kennedy's address to all the governors on health insurance, an event every player in the house was waiting for. The Sheraton ballroom, newly furnished for the governors with a table and state flags, was jammed with waiting staff, press and state troopers. In the wake of a Clamshell Alliance picket against nuclear power plants going on outside, four state troopers were assigned to guard Gov. Meldrim Thomson all day. Security and expectations tightened.

Dukakis introduced the issue of health insurance and its chief advocate, Kennedy, to the front of the room. As the crowd hushed, Kennedy broke into his appeal, pointing to the illustrative charts behind him, reciting the facts and figures he has come to know cold since 1969. His voice rose and broke, and his face was pink in the TV camera floodlights, as he spilled a ballroom-full of Kennedy electricity.

"All you have to do is ask any senior citizen how much they are paying for health care today. Your association is already on record as recognizing the existence of a national health care crisis. But I know as you know that the issue on the minds of every governor these days is basically one issue--Proposition 13. But I would say that if there is one example of government out of control, it's in the health care area. If there is one example of inflated costs with less services, it's health care. If there is one issue that people are tired of seeing--last year six billion inflated dollars were spent without one more band-aid or one more aspirin--it's in the the health care area."

His voice was rising sharply and quickening with anger. People looked around the room at each other, smiling awkwardly and fidgeting in their chairs.

"And I submit that there is no way, NO WAY you are going to get a handle on health costs unless you commit this nation and these states to a national health insurance plan."

He whipped around and pointed to bar graphs comparing Canada's reduced health costs to the ever-increasing rates of the U.S. In 1963, 4.3 per cent of the federal budget was spent on health care. Today it has risen to 12.7 per cent. In 1983 it will be 13.3 per cent and a "whopping" 9.7 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP). Canada, on the other hand, managed to contain its expenditures on health care from 6.8 per cent of the GNP when their national health insurance plan was passed in 1968 to 7 per cent in 1978. Today, health care expenditures comprise 8.8 per cent of the GNP in the United States.

"The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world along with South Africa which doesn't have some form of national health insurance," Kennedy said, "and the issue before the American people is not whether we can afford to have national health insurance, it is whether we can afford not to have it.

"Twenty-six million Americans have no insurance coverage whatsoever. Seven million families this year will incur medical expenses that will exceed 15 per cent of their total income. Fifty-one million Americans live in areas without sufficient access to health care services. Medical costs in general are running wild and Medicaid costs in particular threaten to bankrupt your states. Life expectancies vary widely by race and income levels, and infant mortality rates are 50-100 per cent higher in your urban poverty centers than in the nation as a whole."

Kennedy said that quality health care is a basic human right, and that the rest of the industrialized world "has recognized it as such." He criticized Carter's health insurance proposal which would make the introduction of a national health insurance plan conditional on the state of the economy.

"Today some who espoused that right want tocondition it-to condition it on many things over which the health care system has no control: the state of the economy, the budget deficit, oil embargoes--but human rights are not conditional, and a commitment to a conditional human right is no commitment at all," Kennedy said.