President Clinton Did Not Say What You Think He Said

There’s been a lot of hoopla about former-President Bill Clinton’s recent criticism of Obamacare and the news media is playing some of the more juicer tidbits.

• So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden, 25 million more people have health care and then the people that are out there busting it ― sometimes 60 hours a week ― wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world …
• “But the people that are getting killed in this deal are small businesspeople and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies …”

The response to President Clinton’s condemnation of Obamacare was swift.

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted, “Even former president @billclinton thinks #Obamacare is “the craziest thing in the world.”
• The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, declared “Bill Clinton goes way off message on ObamaCare!”
• Donald Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway said, Bill Clinton was their “best surrogate”

But taking a closer look at his speech, what Bill Clinton really did was to condemn private health insurance and instead, call for a government-run, or single-payer, insurance instead.  Here are some of his other, more relevant quotes:

• “Now the next thing is, we got to figure out now what to do on health care. Her [Hillary] opponent [Trump] said, ‘Oh, just repeal it all. The market will take care of it.’ That didn’t work out very well for us, did it?”
• “It doesn’t make any sense. The insurance model doesn’t work here; it’s not like life insurance, it’s not like casualties, it’s not like predicting flooding. It doesn’t work.”

President Clinton said his wife’s proposal would do something simpler: “figure out an affordable rate and let people use that” … and let them “buy into Medicare or Medicaid.”

Here are some questions for President Clinton:

• I believe the free market determines what an affordable rate is, who decides in your model?
• Why would we want to expand Medicare and Medicaid when the Congressional Budget Office has said these programs are economically unsustainable?
• Why do you want a government-run plan that would allow politicians and bureaucrats to decide the kind of healthcare a patient will have, or perhaps, will not have?

President Clinton gave his opening salvo on adopting government-run health but he is not the first to do this.  Liberal, big-government politicians, and the media have started the drumbeat to move to a single-payer system, claiming that the private sector does not work.  They are wrong.

However, Bill Clinton is correct that Obamacare is a “crazy system.”  But remember, it was President Obama, the Democratically-controlled Congress, and the Washington D.C. bureaucrats that created it!  Do Americans want them to be in charge of all our healthcare needs … and our lives?  The answer should certainly not be putting Washington, D.C. in charge of more of our healthcare.  The government has proven time and time again it is incapable of being efficient and thrifty.

In reality, we have never really had free-market health insurance.  Since the 1940s, health insurance has been almost entirely provided by employers or the government.  The answer is to repeal Obamacare and shift the purchasing power to the consumer. This will create a true market-based system where customers pick the health insurance they want and insurers compete for their business.  Just like anything else, it is competition that drives down cost and increases quality.  That kind of system is just what the doctor ordered.