With the debate looming this Sunday evening and with the issue of healthcare now thrust back into the lime light of the campaign it is worth noting a few points about the current debate and the history between Secretary Clinton and Bernie. The Clinton campaign has made a serious miscalculation in bringing up healthcare at this juncture in the campaign. I’m not sure who’s bright idea it was to remind progressives voting in the primaries and caucuses of the absolute failure of the democratic majority to pass a single payer system or a milder public option. Indeed, bringing up the two year debate that helped pave the way for our 2010 electoral disaster in which Republicans were able to break our majority after only reclaiming it for four years doesn’t show the brightest in political calculations.
Well it is important to remember when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders first met.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-119082
In February, Sanders requested a meeting with Hillary, “to bring in two Harvard Medical School physicians who have written on the Canadian system,” according to the records of the administration’s task force. Those physicians were Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, leading advocates for single-payer health care.
They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make 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?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ”
Let that sink in a minute. Even then Secretary Clinton was not willing to stand up to big money interests and thus far has never proved that she has been willing to. She doesn’t believe that a movement of dedicated citizens can stand up and demand something better for their lives and the lives of their children. Of course now we could easily replace millions with billions given the way the supreme court decision Citizens United has opened up our electoral process to unrestricted money.
This is a fundamental difference between the two candidates. One believes that the United States does not have the political will to do big things for the people. The other believes that we must call upon the American people to say “Enough is enough” and we are going to usher in a New Deal or Great Society with a people powered movement. Pragmatic neo liberal incrementalism vs the New Deal. That’s the choice before us.
Now my main point is that here we are; with partisans in Clinton’s camp flailing about and attempting to find an attack that sticks, and thus asking for Bernie’s single payer plan. That’s valid. We only have the 2013 bill that Sanders introduced and every other Medicare for All bills that have been introduced in the past as a starting point. Now while they are all clamoring for Bernie to release the text of his bill; given Secretary Clinton’s past unwillingness to challenge the insurance industry; isn’t it incumbent upon her to release the texts of her paid speeches as a private citizen to the very same corporations she is going to attempt to regulate as president?
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/hillary-clinton-single-payer/
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.”
Now Secretary Clinton can put all our minds at ease and release the full text of her prepared speeches before the healthcare industry. These speeches were not recorded, nor was any of the text of the speeches released. She keeps very good records though.
I’m sure the speech is saved on an email somewhere.