Not content with waiting to find out whether Vice President Al Gore actually gets his job, President Bill Clinton last week proposed to Congress essentially the vice president’s health-care plan, or a smaller version of it, anyway — a mix of tax credits and Medicaid extensions. While certainly better than nothing, the plan spends $110 billion over the next decade largely to preserve a failing insurance system.

Even with its significant price tag, the president’s plan still would cover only about 5 million of the 44 million without health insurance. At the rate Americans are losing their health coverage, 5 million more could lose their insurance by the end of the 10-year program – the number has risen by 4.5 million just since 1993, when the president took office. In the unlikely event that Congress approves the plan, the president might get credit for keeping the number of uninsured from getting worse. Not exactly a sterling legacy.

Nearly $30 billion of the president’s proposal would go toward tax credits applied to the cost of long-term care. Given the widespread dependence on Medicaid for this type of care, helping patients cover these costs longer is in the government’s interest, and merely raising the issue as a concern is helpful to get people to think about this expensive facet of health care.

But the overall package, while politically acceptable, ignores the biggest problem with the current system: its rapidly rising cost. Large businesses are forced to find more affordable managed-care products. Small businesses, even with tax breaks and employee contributions, have trouble paying for any sort of health coverage. Many individuals can’t even consider it. State governments, including Maine’s, are seeing a good chunk of surplus revenues going to higher-than-expected insurance costs. The key to getting and keeping coverage for the uninsured is to bring down the cost, and that requires a far more radical plan than the president has offered.

President Clinton has neither the support nor the time left to return to the scene of his first-term health-care fiasco and try to repair the damage. If this current proposal is all he believes is possible, then certainly he deserves support to pass. Or, rather, the Americans without health insurance deserve the support. But it is not a cure and only begins to address the symptoms.