Hillary Clinton claims to be the health care champion. She claims that she will fight for universal health care as president, and she has used her position in the former president Clinton's administration to justify her position. However, thanks to Andrew Sullivan pointing out an important issue, we can see that Clinton only cares about health care if it is her plan, and not any one else's.
It's a story that few have heard. If it were to spread like the recent stories of her exaggertions, then she may very well lose her chances at the nomination, as universal health care has been her platform for a long period. So, on to the details:
In 1992, a democratic congressman named Jim Cooper from Tennessee introduced a health care reform plan that gained bipartisan support. However, the plan which he introduced did not include a mandate by employers to force this universal health coverage.
At a meeting in 1993 with Cooper and Hillary Clinton however, she gave the concept no respect. Cooper recalls Clinton as being "ice cold" during the meeting.
Cooper told her that she was getting pulled too far to the left. He warned that her plan would never get through Congress. Clinton’s response, Cooper now says, was: "We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me."
Further investigation reveals the following:
Hillary Clinton set up a war room to oppose Cooper, who was planning to run for the Senate in 1994. As the Broder and Johnson book makes clear, Clinton and her aides believed Cooper was pursuing his own political agenda. They accused him of crafting his plan in order to raise money from the insurance and hospital industries. They said he was in league with the for-profit hospitals to crush competitors and monopolize the industry. They did this despite the fact that Cooper’s centrist health care approach was entirely consistent with his overall philosophy.
At one meeting in the West Wing, a source told Broder and Johnson, Clinton "kind of got this evil look and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this Cooper bill. We’ve got to kill it before it goes any further.’ "
Clinton denounced the Cooper plan as "dangerous and threatening." Deputies were dispatched to Tennessee to attack his plan. Senator Jay Rockefeller said that Cooper is "a real fraud. I hope he doesn’t make it to this place." According to Newsweek, Clinton brought an aide with a video camera to a meeting with senators and asked the senators to denounce Cooper on the spot.
According to Andrew Sullivan, democrats should be more outraged by this type of behavior. I'll leave that to those who study more on it with the link of the article that gives this information:
http://www.nytimes.com/...