https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-payer/
Hillary Clinton’s sudden
attack on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan is a dramatic break
with Democratic Party doctrine that the problem with single-payer is that it is
politically implausible — not that it is a bad idea.
Single-payer, the
Canadian-style system in which the government pays for universal health care,
takes the health insurance industry out of the picture, saving huge amounts of
money. But the health insurance industry has become so rich and powerful that
it would never let it happen.
That was certainly Clinton’s
position back in the early 1990s, when she was developing her doomed universal
coverage proposal for her husband, Bill.
But in the ensuing years, both
Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health
care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton
alone, from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the
industry.
This means that Clinton
brought in almost as much in speech fees from the health care industry as
she did from the banking industry. As a matter of perspective, recall that
most Americans don’t earn $2.8 million over their lifetimes.
Hillary Clinton’s record
on single-payer dates back to 1993, when she was tasked to help formulate White
House policy. According to the notes of former Clinton confidante Diane Blair,
Clinton told
her husband during a dinner in February 1993 that “managed competition” — a
private health insurance market — was “a crock, single payer necessary; maybe
add to Medicare.”
She eventually came to believe
that the health care industry was too powerful to allow this reform to happen,
and the plan she ended up putting together was not single-payer. Also
in 1993, two physician advocates for single-payer lobbied
her during a meeting at the White House. They said she told them they made
a “convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could
counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would
spend fighting that?”
The next year, in response to
a question at a financial conference, then-First Lady Hillary
Clinton said that if there was not a health care overhaul “by the year 2000
we will have a single-payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t think it’s a
close call politically. I think the momentum for a single-payer system will
sweep the country.”
Behind the scenes, Clinton
continued to show interest in a single-payer plan. David
Brock wrote that Alain Enthoven, a Stanford professor who had been brought
in to help advise on health care, pushed back on what Brock deemed “her bias
toward the single-payer plan.”
In 2008, a young medical
student named Lisa Goldman queried Clinton about health care during an event
she held in New Haven, Connecticut. Goldman
told the Boston Globe that Clinton said she believed the plan to be
politically unfeasible at the time, however if a bill establishing it reached
her desk, she would sign it into law.
Since then, she has shifted to
assailing the policy on its merits.
“We don’t have one size fits
all; our country is quite diverse. What works in New York City won’t work in
Albuquerque,” she
told an assorted audience of 20,000 employees of the electronic health
records industry on February 26, 2014; the speech earned her $225,500.
These words were later
cited by business lobbyists in New York state earlier this year to argue
that if even Hillary Clinton opposed single-payer, why should New York adopt
it?
Hillary Clinton’s
paid speech circuit came to an end as her campaign revved up. But for
her husband, with whom she shares a bank account, it hasn’t. This summer, he
was the keynote
speaker at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry group that
poured
almost $100 million into trying to defeat health care reforms during the
fight over the Affordable Care Act.
As part of her newly found
opposition to single-payer on the merits, Hillary Clinton’s attacks on
Sanders’ health care plan mischaracterize what he is proposing. For example,
she has claimed that his plan, which relies on states to administer
the single-payer plan, would
turn “over your and my health insurance to governors.”
Warren Gunnels, the policy
director of Sanders’ campaign, told
The Week that actually this is not the case. If a governor chose not
to participate, “citizens would receive coverage from the feds.” It’s actually
the Clinton-backed status quo under the Affordable Care Act that is allowing
governors to pick and choose who to cover.
by Zaid Jilani
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