Hillary Clinton promises to “fix” Obamacare if she is elected president but critics believe she could bring back the worse elements of her failed 1993 government-run health care bill, a.k.a “Hillarycare.”
Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, a Republican who fought against Clinton’s Health Security Act of 1993, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “While Bill Clinton recently denounced the Affordable Care Act’s effect on the health-care market as ‘the craziest thing in the world,’ ObamaCare was never anything more than a politically achievable steppingstone. As with HillaryCare, a single payer, national health-care system has always been the goal.”
In response to the Obama administration’s announcement that healthcare premiums would go up 25 percent, the Clinton campaign tweeted out a statement Tuesday.
“There’s a clear choice in this election: Either we’re going to help American families and tackle healthcare cost issues, or we’re going to throw 20 million people off their coverage and let the insurance companies write the rules again,” the Clinton campaign statement read. “Hillary Clinton wants to build on the progress we’ve made and fix what’s broken, while Donald Trump would rip up the [Affordable Care Act], reverse the progress we have made and start this fight all over again.”
The Trump campaign wasted no time going after the news on the Obamacare premium hikes and tied the legislation to Clinton.
“Obamacare was just a down payment to Hillary Clinton,” Donald Trump’s running mate Gov. Mike Pence told a crowd of supporters in Ohio Tuesday.
Gramm recalled the Clinton’s last plan in the 1990’s included a “National Control Board,” which would have been the ultimate decision maker over whether an individual could receive any medical benefit or treatment.
The concept that killed Clinton’s bill with the public was the measure that that criminalized doctors as well as imposed civil fines for giving treatments prohibited by the bill’s regional cooperative. Doctors would also face criminal penalties for accepting an additional payment for providing such treatment within a cooperative.
“Families were forced to pay into the regional cooperatives and medical providers had to provide all medical care through the cooperatives or operate completely outside them. Since few families could afford to pay the cooperative for health care and then pay for additional care, and few providers could afford to operate totally outside the system, any real health-care choice would have been extremely limited, very expensive and available only to the highest-income families. When challenged to defend the loss of freedom HilllaryCare entailed, congressional support collapsed and no effort to resurrect it was made until ObamaCare,” Gramm wrote.
Gramm’s colleague, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, hit at Obamcare’s own failing co-ops writing in USA Today Tuesday that in section 1322 of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act’s measures are defined and were established as an alternative to a public option plan, which a number of Democrats were against.
“Fast forward to today, and tens of thousands of Americans have lost their health insurance coverage from failing CO-OPs and taxpayers have footed the $1.8 billion lost on the exercise. If the botched CO-OPs experiment is any indication, a government-run plan would be an unmitigated disaster for middle class families, taxpayers and patients,” Grassley writes.
Clinton has already stated she wants to bring back the public option concept but instead of going through Congress, where a number of Democrats in the upper chamber are against the idea, Clinton may
As first lady, Clinton traveled the country attempting to explain her health care bill but the public turned against Hillarycare and she was met with large protests. The bill failed to find enough support from Democrats in the Senate to over come a filibuster in August of 1994. In November of that same year, Republicans took the majority of the House of Representatives after being in the minority for 40 years.
Grmam cautions, however, “For the ObamaCare of today to be transformed into the HillaryCare of 1993 and finally into a nationalized health-care system, a president is needed who has the willpower to impose the coercive details, nail down hard deadlines and unleash agencies to tighten controls and squeeze the life out of private insurers.”
