Clinton was at Mountain View college today (community college down in Oak Cliff) and chose that opportunity to say some nonsense about Bernie Sanders DMN
DALLAS — Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a boisterous rally here Tuesday to offer a thinly veiled critique of Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders, suggesting his health-care proposals would undermine efforts to reform the system.
Addressing hundreds at Mountain View College, Clinton did not utter Sanders' name but left little doubt about whom she was referring to when she brought up an opponent who she said wants to dismantle President Barack Obama's signature health-care reform law and give more power to the states.
"I don’t know about you, but I’d be a little concerned about turning it over to Greg Abbott," Clinton said in one of several references to the Texas governor. GOP governors like Abbott, Clinton added, "won’t even expand Medicaid to help working people.”
Huh? She just making stuff up? Here's this woman who can't even commit to $15 an hour for minimum wage talking about giving the middle class more. Does she not realize how ridiculous this makes her sound? She sounds like a Republican.
“Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health-care plan,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, referring to legislation Sanders introduced in 2013, “and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda. If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.”
Fear-mongering with threatened tax increases from the woman who wil not #Fightfor15. She KNOWS single payer is better but, what, has to find some way to diffentiate herself from Sanders, since she had followed behind and adopted so many of his positions? Or maybe she's just mad that both he and Martin O'Malley called her out the other night about her Iraq vote that led to destablization of the middle east and the rise of ISIL
Sanders has yet to announce the details of how he will pay for the national single-payer, "Medicare for all Americans" proposal that is a major plank of his presidential campaign. Economic experts have said it would be impossible to institute a single-payer system relying solely on tax hikes on the wealthy. Sanders camp has argued in response that in the long run, the single-payer system will save the country trillions of currently wasted dollars.
"On Medicare for all, the middle class would be far better off because it would save taxpayers money," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in response to Clinton's latest line of attack. "More people would get better care at less cost. Didn't she used to be for that? We wouldn't throw money away on costly premiums for profit-making private insurance companies. Pharmaceutical companies would no longer be able to rip off Americans with the most expensive prescription drugs in the world. Didn't she used to be for that?"
"Secretary Clinton has singled out Senator Gillibrand and praised her [family leave] legislation which, it turns out, Secretary Clinton now refuses to support because of the way it's paid for," Briggs added, noting it requires a small tax hike on the middle class. "No wonder people have their doubts about her."
Hillary Clinton was ALL FOR single payer in 1994 She took a heck of a lot of heat for it then. Does she not think we deserve it now? Why not? Was it because she lost and is more calculating now?
Mrs. Hillary Clinton: No, because what I think would happen if there is not health care reform this year, and if, for whatever reason, the Congress doesn’t pass health care reform, I believe, and I may be to totally off base on this, but I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t even think it’s a close call politically.
I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country. And regardless of the referendum outcome in California, it will be such a huge popular issue in the sense of populist issue that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be. So for those who think that building on the existing public-private system with an employer mandate is radical, I think they are extremely short-sighted, but that is their choice.
There are many ways to compromise health care reform, and I don’t think that the President could have been clearer in every public statement he has made that he has one bottom line. It is universal coverage by a date certain. And he has basically told the Congress, you know, you’ve got different ways of getting there. Come to us, and let’s look at it. There are only three ways to get to universal coverage. You know, a lot of people stand up and applaud universal coverage, and they sit down, and you say, “Well, how are you going to get there?”, and they don’t want to confront that there are only three ways.
You either have a general tax — the single payer approach that replaces existing private investment — or you have an employer mandate, or you have an individual mandate. And there isn’t any other way to get to universal coverage. The market cannot deliver universal coverage in the foreseeable future, and any compromise that people try to suggest that would permit the market to have a few years to try to deliver universal coverage without a mandate that would take effect to actually finish the job will guarantee a single payer heath care system.
In a front-page Wall Street Journal article a few days ago, the projection was made that a single-payer national health insurance program (NHI), as part of the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), would cost $15 trillion over ten years. Accurate though that figure is, this under-researched article conveys disingenuous misinformation to a broad readership that might be inclined to dismiss such a program as too expensive to even consider.
This article is irresponsible in what it doesn't say - what the savings would be of reining in our current wasteful, overly bureaucratic profit-driven medical industrial complex, and the benefits that NHI would bring to our entire population compared to what we have now or have ever had.
Thanks to a landmark study in 2013 by Gerald Friedman, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, we have a solid financial analysis of the costs and benefits of a single-payer national health plan. With NHI, $592 billion would be saved annually by cutting the administrative waste of some 1,300 private health insurers ($476 billion) and reducing pharmaceutical prices to European levels ($116 billion). These savings would be enough to cover all of the 44 million uninsured (at the time of his study) and upgrade benefits for all other Americans, even including dental and long-term care. A single-payer public financing system would be established, similar to traditional (not privatized) Medicare, coupled with a private delivery system. Instead of having to pay the increasing costs of private health insurance, so often with unaffordable deductibles and other cost-sharing, patients would present their NHI cards at the point of service without cost-sharing or other out-of-pocket costs. Care would be based on medical need, not ability to pay. (2)
