Gore Blasts ‘Phony’ Backers of Ads

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Al Gore charged Wednesday that a group sponsoring a multimillion-dollar ad campaign critical of his prescription drug plan is a “phony coalition” that should disclose its secret sponsors.

The vice president said the group, Citizens for Better Medicare, is backed by unidentified drug makers who fear they will lose money under his plan to expand Medicare coverage to prescription costs and use its massive bargaining power to get cheaper prices.

Gore, speaking to the American Federation of Teachers in Philadelphia and a church group in Cincinnati, lashed out at the special interests he says are putting their own agenda ahead of what’s best for the American people.

He said the group is “polluting the public airwaves with special-interest TV ads designed to deceive the American people about a prescription drug benefit.”

As a tax-exempt committee--one of the so-called “527s,” referring to their tax code designation--Citizens for Better Medicare is able to raise unlimited amounts of money without revealing its donors. That loophole was closed in legislation Congress approved last month that President Clinton recently signed.

Gore’s campaign also released a letter Wednesday that the vice president wrote to ad sponsors saying “the real faces behind Citizens for Better Medicare are not those of America’s elderly, concerned about the rising costs of medicines they need, but those of the high-profit pharmaceutical corporations.”

The ads that the group has been running--at a cost Gore estimated at about $30 million--show elderly citizens worried that their drug choices will be taken away from them if Medicare is expanded to cover prescription drugs.

Gore closed the letter: “I will not allow your organization’s gross distortions on this important matter to go unchallenged in this election.”

Dan Zielinski, a spokesman for the group, said it has never concealed that pharmaceutical companies are among their supporters. He said his group has a right to “shape the dialogue” on prescription drug benefits and has 300,000 members nationwide.

Gore’s call for accountability from the group came in a week in which he has focused on health care and drug coverage, generating some of the most pointed accusations of the campaign.

Gore has attacked drug companies for what he calls “exorbitant profits.” His campaign staff has charged that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Gore’s GOP rival, is aligned with the drug companies that are fighting the addition of prescription drug benefits to Medicare and also have direct ties to Citizens for Better Medicare.

Gore has offered more than $80 billion of his health care proposal to bolster drug coverage, keeping it under the Medicare program. A Democratic sponsored bill in the House very similar to the one touted by Gore was stopped by GOP House leaders before it could make it to a full vote.

Bush, the presumptive Republican nominee, has proposed privatizing Medicare prescription drug benefits.

In front of school teachers in Philadelphia, Gore also emphasized his push to expand health coverage to all children by 2005, something he says can be accomplished by expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program. More than 11 million children are without health insurance. Under Gore’s 10-year, $176-billion health care plan--to be paid out of the budget surplus--the CHIP program would be expanded to include families with an income of up to $41,000 for a family of four. States would be held accountable for enrolling eligible children.

His speech to the enthusiastic crowd explained that his audiences, made up of what he calls “average American workers,” contrast with the “powerful interests lined up against us.”

He bounced up and down to music as he shook hands on his way to the podium. He thanked two women in the front row for bringing cardboard cutouts of Elvis Presley dressed up in Gore T-shirts.

And to the loudest cheers of the afternoon, he vowed to never support vouchers for private schools: “It’s as clear as ABC. You cannot save the public schools of America by destroying public education in America.”

Wednesday night he spoke to a packed room at the 46th Quadrennial African Methodist Episcopal conference in Cincinnati, where attendees listened to gospel music as they waited for the vice president.

Gore speaks today in Chicago to the nation’s other large teachers union, the National Education Assn. Both unions this week gave him their formal endorsements.