The Obama administration's unofficial Secretary of Explaining Stuff, former President Bill Clinton,
lent a hand Wednesday on the Affordable Care Act. He chided Republicans for standing in they way, arguing that since "it's the law" it is time that all elected officials, Republicans included, make it work. He explained the necessity of the law, the basics of the law, and what Congress should be doing to make it work better.
“I think we should all work together to implement this law, whether we supported its passage or not,” Clinton said in a speech that was more laden with health policy detail than the explanatory shot-in-the-arm he gave Obamacare in his speech a year ago at the Democratic National Convention.
“I have agreed to give this talk today because I am still amazed at how much misunderstanding there is about the current system of health care, how it works, how it compares with what other people in other countries pay for health care and what kind of results they get and what changes are actually occurring now and are going to occur in the future,” Clinton said. [...]
“You can’t change a complex economic structure like American health care this much without creating some problems, but they can best be solved if we all work together to fix them,” Clinton told a packed room of 300 invited supporters at his presidential library, located at the end of a downtown street named for the 42nd president.
Those fixes Clinton endorsed included making the law’s little-known small-business tax credit more available as well as eliminating a so-called family glitch that could penalize workers who can afford to cover themselves but not their families.
“It’s obviously not fair,” he said. “I think Congress should fix it.”
This Congress won't be fixing anything. This Congress, at least the Republican part of it, will do nothing to make the law work better and anything and everything to try to cripple it. Clinton's speech didn't focus as much on the sabotage part as the drier policy details of the law. Hopefully he'll stick with this publicity push for the law, and maybe get just a little bit more engaged in the politics of it. Because when Bill Clinton
really engages, it's magic.