Hillary Clinton sells her soul on Single Payer Healthcare

@Thomas,

<agreeing with Thomas>

I have a bias, as I'm insurance poor as my parent were too. In my case, breast cancer two surgeries and four eye surgeries (pre medicare age, when I had two more) killed toted up fat money for them re charges to me, plus there were the exhorbitant monthly payments for being my age. I had a middle range interesting and good profession, landscape architecture and art gallery, and the money costs re health insurance killed me.

Lives are not all flatline well or poor earning, for many. Mine was up when I was when I was a kid and then way down later. I was cut out of a state of california scholarship because my father earned a lot one month, must have been borderline (and nothing for the rest of the year). I was dumb enough not to reapply later, much less inquire at the time.

My grades were top of class in some classes and cliff hangers in others. I was both always working or on busses and and also dumber in some stuff. I've no idea if I could have reapplied for a scholarship, but I made it through.

It also never occurred to me to go to go see a counselor. I was too busy.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Let's see if Hillary Clinton will support a public option.

Given the amount of money that Hillary Clinton has received from the insurance industry, I would be very impressed with her if she does so.

Then you should be entering this discussion pre-impressed. Hillary Clinton received lots of money from the insurance industry in 2008, and she still proposed a public option back then.

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@Thomas,

You are right Thomas. I still doubt she will support a public option this election.

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@maxdancona,

She blows like a weather vane, but a few months back, she rejected the public option.

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@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

She blows like a weather vane, but a few months back, she rejected the public option.

Can you give me a pointer to where she did that? I'm aware she's rejecting a Medicare-for-all mandate, but I'm unaware of her rejecting a public option. Of course, this could well be my fault.

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@Thomas,

This is what Hillary was saying in 2008 (and it is kind of ironic.....)

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

In my opinion, the best way forward is to supplement Obamacare with a public option.

There already is a public option:

http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/multi-state-plan-program/consumer/

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@oralloy,

I would like to point out that Hillary and Bill tried to get a public health care plan back in 1993 while Obama was still in school. The same bunch beat it back, like the conservatives, the AMA, and the Drug companies, by buying the congressional members. Not much has changed in 22 years but maybe defective memory.

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@RABEL222,

That wasn't much of an attempt. They didn't really try for a decent health care plan. They certainly didn't spend any real political capital on it.

What Bill and Hillary accomplished included.

- Gutting welfare and putting people with mental illness on the street.
- Passing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy that resulted in more homosexual service members being outed and expelled from the military (including a former roommate of mine).
- Enacting tough on crime bills that put more people in prison (the damage is still being felt).

Bill and Hillary have always put political expedience over principle.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You are right Thomas. I still doubt she will support a public option this election.

Rachel Maddow interviewed Hillary Clinton yesterday. Chris Hayes, just this minute, finished interviewing a Clinton-campaign spokesman. Maddow and Hayes both asked if Clinton still supports the public option she put forward in 2008. Clinton and her spokesman both explicitly said "yes".

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

Thomas wrote:
In my opinion, the best way forward is to supplement Obamacare with a public option.

There already is a public option:

http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/multi-state-plan-program/consumer/

That's not what "public option"means, Oralloy. A public option is a health-insurance policy sold directly by the government, just as Medicare and Medicaid are sold directly by the government. Policyholders can opt to buy the government plan instead of one of the plans offered by private insurance companies. Hence the name "public option".

Your link, by contrast, is to public marketplaces for health insurance. But as far as I can see, all the policies offered on these marketplaces are sold by the private sector. Public market, private products.

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@Thomas,

Sounds like more Cintonian "triangulation" to me. A few days ago she was, in effect, faulting Sanders, who has explicitly proposed a universal single government payer plan, for trashing Obamacare. (Probably an unnecessary exercise in that the various exchanges are going bankrupt at a fast rate.)

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

That wasn't much of an attempt. They didn't really try for a decent health care plan. They certainly didn't spend any real political capital on it.

No, they tried. They just failed.

maxdancona wrote:

What Bill and Hillary accomplished included.
- Gutting welfare and putting people with mental illness on the street.

Welfare was politically unpopular.

I thought the pre-Clinton closures of mental facilities was what turned the mentally ill out onto the street.

maxdancona wrote:

- Passing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy that resulted in more homosexual service members being outed and expelled from the military (including a former roommate of mine).

How did that compare to the previous policy where they were actively sought out?

maxdancona wrote:

- Enacting tough on crime bills that put more people in prison (the damage is still being felt).

The really funny thing about those laws is, the people who today decry those laws as unfair, are the very same people who were insisting on those laws back during the Clinton Administration.

The Clintons must feel really exasperated when they get criticized about this.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Your link, by contrast, is to public marketplaces for health insurance.

The marketplace is at a different link. The plans at this link are sponsored by the government and have special government oversight.

It is true that some of them are run by Blue Cross (a private company, albeit a pretty reputable one). But that makes them sort of a government/private hybrid.

Others are run by those co-ops, making a sort of government/co-op hybrid.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

A few days ago she was, in effect, faulting Sanders, who has explicitly proposed a universal single government payer plan, for trashing Obamacare.

That's consistent with what I heard her say yesterday, and what she said yesterday didn't sound like triangulation to me. Her and her spokesman's main points, as best I remember them, were these:

Given that "Medicare for All" is fiscally the largest promise in Sanders's pitch for the presidency, voters deserve a plan outlining exactly what his promise is and specifically how he intends to deliver. Sanders has promised such a plan several times, but has not yet come up with any.
Absent a concrete plan in Sanders's platform, the best place to look for his healthcare intentions is in the concrete bills that he sponsored in the matter. Their conclusion: If these bills had become law, a Medicare-for-all system similar to the one in House Resolution 676 would have been established, and all the incremental, already-existing steps towards this goal would have vanished at once.
The overall savings Sanders promises are doubtful because they haven't been scored against Obamacare by independent fact-checkers. (Previous vettings did find such savings, but none of them scored Medicare for all against Obamacare. The baseline for previous vettings had been the pre-Obamacare status quo.)
Apart from Sanders's savings being in doubt, his way of bringing about Medicare for all is politically unfeasible because too many Americans like the healthcare they've already got. They will not vote to give it up.

Mind you, I'm not saying that these points are necessarily true; for now I'm just saying that these were the Clinton campaign's points as I understood them yesterday and today.

That being said, my opinion is that points #1 and #4 are perfectly true. I have not fact-checked #2 and #3 myself, but my sense is that #2 is probably true whereas #3 is spin but not scandalously so. Hence, judging by what I'm hearing from the Clinton campaign these days, I see no reason to suspect ulterior motives beyond plain vanilla politics. To be sure, I'm not expecting this to stop the habitual suspicions about such motives among both Republicans and Sanders scorched-Earthers. But then again, these to groups never needed a reason in the first place.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

... To be sure, I'm not expecting this to stop the habitual suspicions about such motives among both Republicans and Sanders scorched-Earthers. But then again, these to groups never needed a reason in the first place.

I found your reply to be reasonable until this last sentence. Habitual suspicions of the motives of the oposition are or less equally distributed in most political disputes.

I agree with you that Sander's proposals for universal free health care, and several other planks in his political platform are unrealistis and implicitly assume a broad political victory in both houses of Congress as well. That criticism could be levelled agaist most of the candidates of both parties, though I'll agree that Bernie's assumptions appear more far-reaching than most. Indeed even preserving the existing Obamacare will require a realignment of the Congress, in that the exchanges are collapsing into bankrupcy at a fast rate and new funding, which the existing Congress will not provide, will be required to save them.

How well would the existing Obamacare legilation have survived independent fact (and even grammar and word choice) checking had either actually occurred?

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According to the Huffington Post, in March 2014 Clinton said, "she supports Obamacare, and opposes single-payer health insurance."[13]
According to a February 2014 report titled, The Hillary Papers, Diane Blair, a political science professor and friend of Clinton's, "wrote that Hillary Clinton vouched for a single payer health-care system during a family dinner in 1993."[14]
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton introduced a healthcare plan that would mandate insurance coverage for all Americans either through a private insurance plan or employer-provided insurance. She proposed funding the program by repealing the Bush tax cuts. According to Newsweek, "It was Obama who ultimately came around to Clinton's point of view when he included the mandate in his own health care proposal."[15][16]
In a 2004 op-ed, Clinton wrote, "As Senator John Kerry has proposed, we should cover everyone living in poverty, and all children; allow people to buy into the federal employee health benefits program; and also help employers by reinsuring high-cost claims while assuming more of the costs from hard-pressed state and local governments."[17]
Hillary Clinton was a chief proponent of the Bill Clinton's Health Security Act, which proposed "to reform the health care system so that all Americans are guaranteed comprehensive health coverage."[18]
Clinton was instrumental in the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides matching funds to states to provide health insurance to children in low-income families.[19]

https://ballotpedia.org/2016_presidential_candidates_on_healthcare

As I keep saying, she supports whatever the polls tell her to support.

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@edgarblythe,

Oy.

Not that this is news, and not that I never change my mind.

Still, Trump? Or the others?

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@maxdancona,

Quote:

That wasn't much of an attempt.

But as you admit it was an attempt beaten back by the organizations that I listed. Hell, even the democratic members of congress dident help them because they were bought than just as they are now. And you believe that Bernie is going to put that chicken in your pot in spite of republican and democratic opposition? Money talks, big money yells.

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@RABEL222,

RABEL222 wrote:

Quote:
That wasn't much of an attempt.

But as you admit it was an attempt beaten back by the organizations that I listed. Hell, even the democratic members of congress dident help them because they were bought than just as they are now. And you believe that Bernie is going to put that chicken in your pot in spite of republican and democratic opposition? Money talks, big money yells.

With Bernie Sanders, addressing the need for a true single-payer health care system is not a political trick or a half-hearted attempt at a mediocre solution. He has be consistently advocating for a single payer system no matter what the polls have said for a long time.

I don't believe that electing Bernie Sanders will made getting to this point a done deal. It won't, getting to a single payer system will be a hard fought struggle that will need a long term, whole-hearted effort.

But I will guarantee you that Hillary Clinton will not get us there. She hasn't even indicated that she will try.

The first Clinton administration was a bunch of half-hearted compromises that were made for political advantage. Many of them-- such as welfare reform, don't ask don't tell, and the tough on crime policies, ended up doing harm.

We have been there and done that all before.

1 Reply

Hillary Clinton sells her soul on Single Payer Healthcare

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