Jonathan Chait: Bill Clinton Wants You to Keep Your Plan, Won’t Say How

[flpoljunkie]

Bill Clinton Wants You to Keep Your Plan, Won’t Say How
By Jonathan Chait

In the midst of the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration has done a fairly effective job persuading red-state Democrats to refrain from endorsing legislative changes that would substantively cripple the new law. But organizing skittish red-state senators is one thing; organizing Bill Clinton is another. The former president now says that the government should change Obamacare to allow everybody in the individual market who likes their plan to keep it:

How could you change the law to do this? It would be really, really hard. The main rationale for Obamacare is that the individual-health-care market is dysfunctional. Most people who can’t get group insurance — either through their job or through a government-financed plan, like Medicare — can’t get any insurance at all. Insurers have to make sure they don’t attract sick customers, so they either attach hidden conditions to their insurance to protect against covering expensive care, or else limit their policies to very healthy people. That’s why people with individual insurance are much less satisfied than people with group-based insurance.

It is true that some of those very healthy people can get cheap insurance, as long as they remain healthy. But insurance requires spreading risk from the healthy to the sick. That’s how employer insurance works, and people like that kind of insurance much more. The math is also inescapable. If insurance companies have to charge sick people less than it costs to cover their medical expenses, then the money needs to come from somewhere. Obamacare furnishes some of that money through tax credits, some of it through Medicaid expansions, but a portion comes from higher premiums to people who are healthy.

If you want to make sure every healthy person paying low rates in the individual market right now can keep their plan, then you have two choices. One is to abolish Obamacare altogether, which means making it impossible for people with preexisting conditions to get affordable insurance. Clinton doesn’t want to do that — he continues to endorse the law. The second is to come up with some other source of funding to compensate insurance companies for their losses. Clinton doesn’t say where that money would come from.

When Clinton delivered a well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention last summer, President Obama joked he should appoint the former president as “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” Of course, if he actually had a job like that, he would be fired within days.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/11/clinton-endorses-keep-your-plan-wont-say-how.html

[bigdarryl]

1. Big dog needs to shut the fuck up

[silvershadow]

2. He is just wants his space (Hillary's). nt

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. What is this obession with junk insurance?

Are some people just happy to have SOMETHING called "insurance" that they will buy anything as long as it is cheap, even if it doesn't do a damned thing for them if (more likely, when) they get sick. People may be young and healthy one day but that can all change with a trip to your doctor, not to mention all of the totally random, unpredictable stuff that happens to people everyday that leaves people sick, maimed, and lying in a hospital bed.

[wilt the stilt]

4. Clinton has never liked Obama

He knows that this is playing right into the hands of republicans. He wants Hilary to be the knight in shining armor and "fix it". This is completely undermining Obamacare. As a person who bought his own insurance they way insurance worked is every year your policy went up and your coverage went down.
Clinton has never been the friend of the downtrodden or the middle class. Don't you forget it.

[karynnj]

8. This is another time where I really question whether Bill Clinton is not the most over rated

politician. He lucked out, as a media favorite, in 1992 when his past fell out of the closet - and the media pretty much pushed him and Hillary anyway. He then ran a three way race with the third candidate bashing GHWB more than he spoke of Clinton and then himself turning into someone that a majority of people thought weird when he dropped out and a President who was below 40 percent. The War Room makes the story that they overcame all the problems and won - but it ignores that this should have been as easy a race for the Democrat who got the nomination as 2008 was.

Then he chose to get himself in front with the media - speaking about his past - ie Monica - the weekend before Gore's convention and the month before Kerry's - where he also bashed any lefties who questioned how Bush was running the war (much less whether it was a good idea.) Can we say - unhelpful?

Now, that made me in 2005 question whether he really wanted Gore or Kerry to win. Then I saw how completely unhelpful he was at points in Hillary's campaign. I really think she might have won had he gone on some mission in support of his foundation overseas for the first half of 2008!

He is a loose cannon and here he HAD to know what he was doing. This write up in the OP is a very good explanation why changing the law - which we are unlikely to be able to in a sensible way - is a bad idea.

Obama has already said they are looking at some fixes. How much you want to bet, Clinton will claim credit for them AND say they are not enough.

Yet, Hillary's STRONGEST claim to the nomination is what she did in the Obama administration. She has the natural position of having strong support from both of the last two Democratic Presidents. In 2008, one thing that was hard for other nominees was that to run against her, opponents had to argue that not everything was good in Clinton's Presidency. She has the ability to make it BOTH of the last two Democratic Presidencies. Distancing her from a major accomplishment -- when she had NO responsibility for the implementation (thus can;e be blamed), is not helpful.

[Whisp]

9. That is my take on it as well.

There is always something in it for Clinton when he opens his stupid yap like this. It is not about what the right thing to do is, how people in general will benefit - it's about his/their wallets and power.

Undermine Obama (which he has been sniping at since 2008), undermine Obama's biggest achievement - ACA. Dismantle it but not ruin it, get Hillary in and take the fucking credit when the Clinton's 'fix it'.

Modus Operandi a la Clinton.

[hedgehog]

5. Because Clinton Care was such a success!

[politicaljunkie41910]

6. Dems just can't resist the urge to rush in when they see the party across the aisle's

house imploding. They can't resist the urge to have their party implode too. Mary Landriu has always looked out for herself. Last week she hitched a ride aboard Air Force One to Louisiana with the President, but quickly abandoned him upon getting off the plane, giving the press more food for fodder. If you didn't want to stand by the President, than you should have taken flight, not his.

Agree, that Bill Clinton appears to be distancing Hillary from Obamacare. Instead of keeping a united front which the Repugs have always seemed to master until now, the Dems are once again, all out for themselves. At least the Repugs can claim to at least be looking out for their voters. The Dems just do shit that won't earn them a single vote, but will cost them votes in the final analysis when people just decide to sit it out come election day.

[bigdarryl]

7. Hillary WILL NOT!!!

become President without Obama

[Whisp]

10. maybe that is why bully Billie is in a snit.

maybe that is why Biden is sort of quiet lately - he may be prepping. And Obama is supporting him and not The Queen. Therefore, foot stompin' billie foot stomps.

heh.

[LoisB]

11. I would vote for Biden in a heartbeat over Hillary.

[MBS]

12. Charles Pierce has a similar message

http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_tag/Affordable%20Care%20Act/15;1

. . . The unspoken -- but fundamental -- basis for Clinton's triangulation on most issues during his time in office was somehow to enact something resembling progressive social policies while still staying in the good graces of the financial services industry and the Masters Of The Universe therein. This was a plausible strategy in the longterm only if a) you had a never-ending tech boom and an eternal housing bubble in your pocket, and b) there were still some Republicans invested in the notion that the United States should have a functioning national government. Neither of those elements exist today. The MOTU proved to be essentially destructive to the world economy, throwing us into a recession from which most of us have not yet crawled. And the Republicans have gone insane, giving themselves over entirely to a campaign of vandalism that is unprecedented in the history of the country. In short, this is no longer time to be listening to Bill Clinton on everything. His politics were formed in a different time under different circumstances.
If the Democratic party, through its elected leaders, bails on the health-care law even so far as go out of its way to let people keep their lousy insurance plans that do not come up to the Affordable Care Act's specifications, that's pretty much the ballgame. There will be barbering and compromising until hell won't have it and, eventually, the only thing left will be the Medicaid expansion, and we all know the vast influence that poor and lower middle class people have over the political process. (And, as Steve M shrewdly notes, the Democrats will get blamed for the deleterious effects of any changes now anyway.) There is far less of a downside right now to being stubborn, regardless of what the courtier press is telling nervous Democrats. . .

If Bill thinks that the best way to campaign for Hillary is to undermine the health care bill and also Obama's legacy, that not only reflects poorly on Clinton's character: it's just plain political stupidity. And, with karynnj, it does make me wonder about Clinton's supposed political "genius".