Clinton's Health Care Attack Makes No Sense

[cal04]

(snip)
This is mostly rank nonsense. A single-payer system, like it does in many other countries, would cover everybody, period. To say otherwise is either willfully misunderstanding how it would work or simple scaremongering.

Hillary Clinton, jumping on a line in an old Sanders bill that says his plan would be administered by the states, is attempting to tie him to the failure of many Republican governors to embrace Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which has resulted in millions of people being denied health insurance. But that's very different from single-payer: Sure, Republican governors could maybe try to weasel out of whatever a President Sanders had in mind, but to think he would design a plan that governors could just ignore is silly. (For the record, Sanders' camp emphatically says the plan would apply to everyone.)

Chelsea Clinton's attack is even worse, making it sound as if Sanders is like the Republicans who call to "repeal and replace" Obamacare without actually drafting a "replace" plan. As former Obama administration adviser David Axelrod said on CNN last night, "Bernie Sanders is proposing single-payer, universal healthcare. You can hardly say he is trying to take health care away from anyone or retreat from Obamacare. He's trying to exceed it. And so it's not really an honest attack."

But Hillary Clinton doubled down on her daughter's words on Wednesday, saying on "Good Morning America" that Sanders would "take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now of the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together.” As she knows, since she is well-versed in health care policy, that's a feature, not a bug of single-payer; the alphabet soup of insurance programs is one of things that makes American health care so confusing and inefficient. Instead of attacking the idea on the merits, she's choosing to make it seem as if Sanders has a callous disregard for people losing health insurance.


http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/pat-garofalo/articles/2016-01-13/hillary-clintons-bizarre-attack-on-bernie-sanders-health-care-plan

[HassleCat]

1. Democratic opposition to single payer or alternatives

So many members of our party want to retain the complicated, costly mish-mash of private insurance and various government programs we have now. If I were a cynical person, I would conclude they benefit from exploiting the chaos.

[eridani]

8. 81% of Democrats Support Single Payer, as well as 58% of all Americans

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/12/1469108/-81-of-Democrats-Support-Single-Payer-and-58-of-all-Americans

A reminder, given the discussion about Single Payer that Chelsea Clinton has given rise to:

From the Kaiser Health Tracking poll, December 2015:

When asked their opinion, nearly 6 in 10 Americans (58 percent) say they favor the idea of Medicare-for-all, including 34 percent who say they strongly favor it. This is compared to 34 percent who say they oppose it, including 25 percent who strongly oppose it. Opinions vary widely by political party identification, with 8 in 10 Democrats (81 percent) and 6 in 10 independents (60 percent) saying they favor the idea, while 63 percent of Republicans say they oppose it.

Hillary Clinton’s opposition to Single Payer, and it is worth Chelsea Clinton bemoaned the elimination of private insurance today, is a deeply minority position within the Democratic Party.

I have long thought Single Payer was a dividing line between third way types and liberals. The US spends an absurd amount of money on a corrupt system. Obamacare was an enormous improvement, but most in the party support the Medicare for all system that Sanders support.

[HassleCat]

9. I should have been more specific

I know many Democrats favor single payer. It's our party leaders who are holding back.

[EdwardBernays]

2. How many stupid mistakes is she allowed to make

Before people are allowed to reasonably question her judgement and temperament?

Because if you add this to the personal email server to Iraq, she just makes a lot of mistakes.

[draa]

4. Not only mistakes but this reeks of incompetence.

She had a similar problem in 2008 as well.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/09/the-front-runner-s-fall/306944/

[EdwardBernays]

6. Geez

That's not good

[subterranean]

3. Her comment about turning health insurance over to the states puzzled me.

That's because with the exception of Medicare, all of the programs she listed are already administered or regulated by the states. That's how Canada's healthcare system operates, too. But she tried to paint it as some scary, radical idea.

[Ed Suspicious]

5. That's because she was scaremongering.

[LiberalElite]

7. I'd also describe it as "going right wing" which

isn't too far over for her to go in the first place.