By Barbara Koeppel (First
published on April 15, 2008)
The problem for presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton is how to stop kicking herself in the leg. Although
she’s scored real achievements over the years, when repeating her
35-years-of-experience mantra, she pushes the facts too far.
By now, her gaffes on Tuzla,
Bosnia, where her claims of “landing under sniper fire” and “running for cover”
are well-known. Ditto her lines on Northern Ireland – where Nobel Peace Prize
winner Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, Ireland, said she was “a wee bit silly” for
exaggerating the part she played in bringing peace.
But if we reality-check some
other claims, what can we say of her 35 years, on which she hopes to
distinguish herself from Sen. Barack Obama, who has actually logged more years
in elected posts, counting his years in the Illinois legislature?
To start with, for 14 of the
35 years that she’s counting, Clinton was a full-time corporate litigator in
Little Rock, Arkansas, at the Rose Law Firm. Further, for her White House years
– aside from her work as chair of the President’s Task Force on Health Care
Reform – she served as First Lady, not policy maker.
While First Lady in Arkansas,
she did, as she claims, help “transform the education system.” Teachers and
others there agree that, as chair of a commission to re-write Arkansas’
deplorable education standards, she was effective. Among other things, the new
norms raised teacher salaries and amounts spent per pupil, and reduced class
size.
Since Arkansas ranked 49th out
of America’s 50 states in most educational measurements, and dead last in the
percent of students who went on to college, the base was so low that any gains
would be good. But it’s a fact the numbers improved.
Add to the fact column her
work on child welfare boards, like the Children’s Defense Fund and the Arkansas
Advocates for Children and Families.
Dubious Claims
Other claims, however, are
downright dubious, if not terminal twaddle. Let’s start with her
now-impassioned concerns for workers’ rights. This is surely an eyebrow-raiser,
since her record on labor issues is roughly zero.
For example, she was on
WalMart’s Board of Directors from 1986-1992, a company legendary for its low
wages and union busting. Not surprisingly, her official biography omits this
six-year stint.
Nor does she mention it when
she woos blue-collar workers. In an effort to expunge the WalMart connection,
Clinton returned its $5,000 campaign contribution to her in 2005.
According to Sam Ortega, a
Wall Street Journal reporter and author of In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of
Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart is Devouring America, the company fiercely fought
any union attempts to organize WalMart workers – threatening, spying on and
firing supporters, all illegal acts.
Ortega writes that, during a
Teamsters’ campaign at a distribution center, “Sam Walton bluntly told them
he’d take away their profit-sharing if they voted for the union.”
Further, Ortega says many
workers “remember his (Walton’s) threats with perfect clarity.” He adds that
one worker, Larry Havener, recalls, “He told us if the union got in, the
warehouse would be closed.”
Worse, Ortega writes, “union
activists were soon laid off — always for some other stated reason, of course.”
Moreover, “Walton asked all employees to call John Tate – the company’s chief
union-buster – if they noticed anything that smacked of union activity,” Ortega
notes.
Low Wages
WalMart’s devotion to low
wages seems not to have lost Clinton any sleep. Ortega notes that in 1988 – two
years after Clinton joined the Board – an Arkansas state senator publicly
attacked the company for “dumping its overhead on state taxpayers, saying many
of its near minimum-wage workers made so little they had to get by on public
assistance.”
Another problem plaguing the
company was the use of child workers – some as young as nine – by its foreign
suppliers: When shown photos of children in Saraka, a Bangladesh sweatshop that
made WalMart-label shirts, the company claimed ignorance.
But in 1990, the Saraka plant
had a fatal fire killing some 25 children, the year before WalMart contracted
with the company. An NBC News report said the child workers were locked in the
factory until they finished each day’s production.
Moreover, despite her
long-term concern for health care – along with child welfare, Clinton’s
signature issues – she stayed on the Board although Ortega says WalMart insured
fewer than 40 percent of its workers.
Why? Perhaps it was Clinton’s
$15,000 annual WalMart salary, which rose to $45,000, for her service at four
meetings a year, at a time her husband earned just $35,000 as Governor. Perhaps
it was her corporate lawyer role at the conservative Rose Law Firm in Little
Rock, where she worked from 1978 until the couple moved to the White House.
Perhaps it was Arkansas’ “right-to-work” fundamentalism that made her mute.
Whatever the motive, today’s worries for working-blokes’ concerns ring hollow.
Then there’s NAFTA (the North
American Free Trade Agreement), which passed on her husband’s watch in 1994.
Critics worried then, and insist now, that it caused the loss of hundreds of
thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Later, candidate Clinton claimed to have
doubted NAFTA’s merits from the start. But the record indicates otherwise. In
2004, she praised NAFTA as “good for New York and America.”
Health-Care Choices
But more than any others,
Clinton’s claims about her desire to improve health coverage and care through
her efforts as chair of President Clinton’s health care task force are
seriously flawed.
History and numbers tell the
story best. In 1993, health care was a crisis for the U.S. public: 37 million
Americans had none, and millions more had very little. Thus, public opinion
polls ranked it as the number-two concern, second only to the economy – since
the country was in a recession.
A majority wanted universal
health care: Even many providers and the American Medical Association initially
favored some form of universal plan. The universal model adopted in Canada and
most Western European countries, called the single-payer system, is not
socialized medicine, as insurance companies repeat by rote.
Governments do not tell
patients which doctors to see. Nor do they dictate what doctors may or may not
do. Instead, it’s a payment mechanism, like Medicare: The government pays the
health care bills directly, rather than the insurance companies.
This way, overhead costs
linked to billings are slashed: In 1993, when First Lady Clinton launched her
health-care task force, a hospital official in Windsor, Canada, told me his
costs associated with billing the Government for patient services accounted for
just 9 percent of the hospital’s budget, while the average U.S. hospital spent
14 percent – a big difference in a multi-million-dollar budget.
In Canada, the savings left
huge sums for covering patient care.
Did Clinton’s task force
examine the single-payer option? Alas, it was never on the table. According to
Vicente Navarro, a physician and professor of health and public policy at Johns
Hopkins University, and a member of Clinton’s task force, he tried repeatedly
to get it considered, and failed.
In a 2007 CounterPunch
article, “Why
Hillary’s Health Care Plan Really Failed,” Navarro writes that although he
promoted the views of the single-payer community (unions, grassroots
organizations and many providers) “they were heard but not heeded. … I had the
feeling I was in the White House as a token.”
Nixing Single-Payer
Why such disdain for the
system used in most industrialized nations? Navarro says Bill Clinton was
pushing the managed-competition model, backed by the insurance industry, where
the companies “have full control over health-care providers.” As proof, he
writes that Bill Link, vice president of Prudential, stated that “For
Prudential, the best scenario for reform … would be … managed competition.”
The plan that Hillary
Clinton’s task force ultimately sent to the Senate failed to pass, but not,
Navarro insists, because of “bad timing” or the “excessive generosity” of the
plan’s proposed benefits, as is generally believed. Rather, it died because
President Clinton and Hillary Clinton refused to send a plan that was truly
universal, and one around which the public could mobilize.
Thus, no plan was approved and
insurance companies continued to control – and prosper from – the U.S.
health-care model.
Fourteen years later (at the
time of this article), another 10 million were uninsured and millions more were
under-insured – often impoverished by serious or even not-so-serious illnesses.
Again, why? Why rule out even
a cursory discussion of single-payer models?
Navarro says Hillary Clinton
told him a single-payer plan was not politically possible. But to pass NAFTA,
the President twisted every congressional arm he needed to make the deal. So,
why couldn’t he use the bully pulpit to mount the same push for universal health
care – an issue on which most of the public agreed? One answer could be
contributions from the insurance industry and those connected to it: According
to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), over Bill Clinton’s career,
insurance industries rank among the top 20 donors, while law and the financial
firms are among the top 10 – the sectors often tightly linked to the insurance
industry.
Fast forward to 2008 and,
based on CRP figures, the industry continues its generosity, this time to
Hillary Clinton – giving $913,000 to date. Obama has benefited too, with
$700,000.
(The complicated Clinton
health-care plan failed in 1994, but President Barack Obama eventually pushed
through a somewhat similar plan in 2010 although it still fell short of
universal coverage, leaves many of the insured with high deductibles and has
become a rallying point for Republican opposition to Obama and other
Democrats.)
Since Bill Clinton and other
Hillary supporters complained in 2008 that she was picked on by the press, she
would do well if she only claimed what is legitimate. This way, the press would
not have to flush out the fables.
Barbara Koeppel is a
Washington-based investigative reporter
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