Hillary’s Lame Health Care Plan

Posted by BooMan | Sep 17, 2007 | 14 |

Giving up before she even gets started:

DES MOINES, Iowa – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a call for universal health care on Monday, plunging back into a political battle she memorably waged and lost as first lady more than a decade ago.

“This is not government-run,” Clinton said of her plan to extend coverage to an estimated 47 million Americans who now go without.

In other words, no single-payer health care for you. Oh, hell no!

“I know my Republican opponents will try to equate health care for all Americans with government-run health care. Don’t let them fool us again. This is not government-run.”

Please, please, please, Hillary exhorts, don’t accuse me of advocating single-payer health care.

…aides stress that no new federal bureaucracy would be created under the Clinton plan.

Thank effing God for that. If she tried to get universal single-payer health care she might get criticized. Oh wait…

Republican Mitt Romney, in New York City for a fundraising stop, criticized Clinton’s proposal, saying, “‘Hillary care’ continues to be bad medicine … in her plan, we have Washington-managed health care. Fundamentally, she takes her inspiration from European bureaucracies.”

The plan that Romney helped institute while governor of Massachusetts requires the same individual insurance mandate as Clinton’s and uses state subsidies to help reduce the cost of private coverage. Since then, Romney has said he would leave it up to the states to decide whether they supported such a mandate.

Said Republican Rudy Giuliani’s campaign: “Senator Clinton’s latest health scheme includes more government mandates, expensive federal subsidies and more big bureaucracy — in short, prescription for an increase in wait times, a decrease in patient care and tax hikes to pay for it all.”

You will rarely, if ever, get something unless you ask for it. This is what the candidates should say:

I will pursue the strongest health care plan that I can get through Congress. If I have to compromise on single-payer to insure all Americans, I will do so. But if you give me the White House and a filibuster proof Senate, I can assure you that every American will be fully insured, and businesses will no longer be saddled with crippling medical benefit costs that wind up costing us jobs and crippling economic growth.

Or something along those lines.

About The Author

BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

14 Comments

idredit on September 17, 2007 at 3:13 pm

$110 billion per year is a band aid.

Good sound bite. Not for ordinary people who are making a choice between food, gas and shelter. With a recession looming, it’s Doomed.
shergald on September 17, 2007 at 3:28 pm

Hillary is a lost cause, as she is still beating the drum for Bill’s old Republican-Lite agenda. The only thing we will get out of Hillary is another four years of moaning and gripping about same old corporatism and changing liberal-socialism as we know it. That means more K Street politics and the shaft for the poor.
AliceDem on September 17, 2007 at 3:35 pm

another reason to nominate someone else.
chocolate ink on September 17, 2007 at 3:59 pm

This is just a crock of shit pure and simple. She waited all this time to come up with this piece of crap. Just trying to read through the article pissed me off. Does she really think this is some kind of bold plan? And her obsessing that this is NOT a government plan as if all government is bad…no only the corrupt/stupid or clueless people who run government plans/offices make government bad…anyway if she’s so against government plans maybe she’ll come out against Medicare and Social Security next..Did I say this was crap..
- Indianadem on September 17, 2007 at 8:03 pm
  
  And her obsessing that this is NOT a government plan as if all government is bad…
  
  FSM help us! She’s been sleeping with Norquist!
boran2 on September 17, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Well phrased, BooMan.
demolover on September 17, 2007 at 4:47 pm

I am so annoyed when I hear so-called pundits on TV saying that Hillary proposed single-payer health care in 1993, or that the bizarre puzzle she proposed was actually a national health care plan. This woman has opposed real national health care for her entire political career. Apparently it takes a village to raise a child, but if the child gets sick we’ll call an insurance corporation and offer the parents a tax rebate.

The right has vilified Hillary Clinton as a far-left neo-commie because they want her to be the candidate. If they can convince enough uninformed Democratic and Independent voters that Hillary really is a true liberal they will vote for her in the primary and then they can put Rudy or some other nutcase in the White House to complete the destruction of America.
dada on September 17, 2007 at 4:53 pm

More of her “lets go back to the way it was” nostalgia driven campaign. What’s this supposed to mean? ” As First Lady, she fought for health care reform, and has the scars to show for it.”.

l think for her to draw comparisons to her failed attempt 14 years ago, and somehow claim that the ‘scars’ from that give her proposal a higher status than other candidates is unwise. The republicans savaged her for years with that failure.

Edwards has jumped right back at her in a speech today in Chicago:

“In 1993, we controlled Congress and the White House and we had a Democratic president with the courage to propose a universal health care plan. That plan was completely killed – run out of town by an army of lobbyists working for the big insurance companies, drug companies, and HMOs. Since 1993, the number of people without insurance has grown from 39.7 million to 47 million and insurance premiums have nearly doubled. We didn’t get health care, we got NAFTA.

The cost of failure 14 years ago isn’t anybody’s scars or political fortune, it’s the millions of Americans who have now gone without health care for more than 14 years and the millions more still crushed by the costs.

“So I’m glad that, today, the architect of the 1993 plan has another care proposal – and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I’m flattered.

But unless Senator Clinton’s willing to acknowledge the truth about our broken government and the cost of health care reform, I’m afraid flattery will get us nowhere.

Actually bringing change starts with telling the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington has been hijacked for the benefit of corporate profits and the very wealthiest.

Many good people go to Washington and learn the game so well that they don’t even realize they’re defending the very interests that have rigged the game against average Americans.

I don’t believe you can sit down with the lobbyists, take their money, and cut a deal with them. If you defend the system that defeated health care, I don’t think you can be a president who will bring health care. The only way to bring real health care reform is to end the Washington influence game once and for all.

You also have to be honest about what health care is going to cost and you have to have a plan to pay for it. My plan will cost $90 to $120 billion and I pay for it by repealing George Bush’s tax cuts on the very wealthiest Americans.

The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, `If you can’t beat `em, join `em.’ I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests – you can never join `em, you just have to beat `em.

If you’re going to negotiate universal health care with the same powerful interests that killed it before, your proposal isn’t a plan, it’s a starting point. I’d like to know what a principled compromise looks like on universal health care. When you cut the deal on universal, who gets left out? And if you don’t compromise on the universal part, does that mean you compromise on the health care part? Lower quality? Higher costs? I don’t believe in it.”

[…]

complete text

Frankly, l don’t understand why we should be trying to figure out how to restore some fairness, dignity and caring in the country by following the failed strategies of the past. lt didn’t work then, it’s not very likely to work now.

Cl and AliceDem are right…This is just a crock of shit pure and simple…another reason to nominate someone else.

lTMF’sA
- AP on September 17, 2007 at 5:18 pm
  
  We didn’t get health care, we got NAFTA.
  
  From a Democratic President. Who selfishly and royally screwed members of his own party and merrily triangulated with rethugs to get it.
  
  There are some things that ought to just remain in the 90s: OJ Simpson is one…the Clintons are another.
  - CabinGirl on September 17, 2007 at 6:34 pm
    
    Don’t diss Bill now; NAFTA is what made him one of the best Republican presidents we ever had… 😉
    - AP on September 18, 2007 at 11:05 am
      
      I KNOW!
      
      Bill genuflected at the “Greatness that is Greenspan” and we better not forget that that’s what made Bill Clinton great.
      
      Groan…
anarchronarchist on September 17, 2007 at 5:11 pm

New career for the Booman: SPEECH WRITER!!
AP on September 17, 2007 at 5:13 pm

Zzzzzzzzzzzz…

Wake me when she has a new plan.
keepinon on September 17, 2007 at 9:47 pm

I really don’t want to be a detractor of someone who could become the first woman President of our country, but jeeze….this doesn’t give me a lot of faith, does it?

Hillary’s Lame Health Care Plan

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BooMan

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