Hillary’s Obamacare Problem

Emerging Corruption – eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty

When I have an informal discussion with folks about what the future looks like, particularly with respect to 2016, inevitably the topic of Hillary Clinton comes up.  What my friends are especially wondering and concerned about is “do you think Hillary Clinton will win the White House?”  It is a daunting proposition.  Even my 90 year old mom shudders at the prospect.  While there is no underestimating the foolishness and gullibility of the mass electorate, the impressions I’m gathering as I monitor the Clinton machine in the run up to 2016, suggest to me that the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave gets steeper and steeper for Hillary and Bubba – who will be riding shotgun, as each day passes.  I do believe that despite the volatility of Hillary’s vicissitudes of popularity and momentum, she remains a serious threat on the horizon to this nation and our future.

Hillary is her own worst enemy though.  Many have observed that Obamacare resembles Hillarycare in too many crucial points of comparison.  In fact, Hillary was a major proponent of the Individual Mandate – a provision of Obamacare that even Obama himself campaigned against in 2008.  But it’s even weirder.  Hillary herself originally argued against the Individual Mandate in 1994.  In a speech to the Group Health Association of America, Clinton said that

“The individual mandate create some additional problems, at least as we analyze them. It makes it very difficult to determine and monitor who is in the system and who is out. It would require tracking individuals as they move in and out of jobs, as they move in and out of the insurance market. And it would mean, if you provided a subsidy scheme to support low-wage individuals, a determination as to when their income reached some arbitrary level as to what kind of subsidy they would still be entitled to. It would require, in our view, the IRS to engage in an enormous administrative oversight of our health care system.”

That was until, beginning in 2005-2006, in the run up to her presidential nomination bid, she began to amass enormous campaign contributions from healthcare insurers.  Then all her reservations about the mandate vanished.  CNN Money reported:

According to Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign finance filings, Clinton has received $781,112 in contributions from the health-care sector during the current election cycle…the center’s Web site shows that the sector is not the top contributor to Clinton.  Donations from lawyers, retirees as well as Wall Street, real estate and the entertainment industries have all topped her contributions from health care.  She is also the No. 1 recipient from each of those sectors.

There’s much more to be learned about Hillary and the financial sector, which we will detail in a forthcoming article, but moving forward into the nomination cycle in 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org, Hillary was the leading fundraiser among all candidates still in the race from health professionals, the pharmaceutical and health products industry, hospitals and nursing homes and health services/HMOs, having collected a total of nearly $3.7 million from the entire health sector.

Curiously, although Hillary strongly advocated throwing the lasso around the largely mythical healthcare ‘freeloaders’, her own campaign wound down with a reported $292,000 worth of unpaid medical premiums for plans covering her large campaign staff.  She had to be dunned by Aetna Healthcare and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield in order to cough up the money.  Is this a familiar theme – politicians thinking that the rules they make and the obligations they rack up, do not apply to them?  Maybe she thought Aetna and BlueCross would just write off the debt as donations to the ‘smartest woman in the world’.

In any event, a statement made to Dennis Hastert in 1993, referring to her healthcare blueprint, gives us insight into her outlook on average Americans:

“We just can’t trust the American people to make those types of choices…. Government has to make those choices for people“ (From the book “I’ve Always Been A Yankee Fan” by Thomas D. Kuiper).  

Can there be any wonder, given this elitist, ruling class perspective, why one of the tenets of Obamacare, built on the mainframe of Hillary’s blueprint, imposes a limited menu of choices on the American people?

As a side note, any Republican she may face in 2016, had better come to the table with clean hands, because a number of establishment Republicans, dating back to 1994, have their own fingerprints all over the individual mandate.
   
This is merely one aspect of the liability side of Hillary Clinton’s balance sheet, which by any objective analysis, shows her political capital seriously in the Red.  I’ll be covering an equally damaging side of Hillary’s great chasm between her rhetoric and her true nature and practices, in an upcoming post – but it is plain that Hillary won’t be able to separate herself from the devastation and stench of Obamacare.  Why?  Because Obama has destroyed his brand and he’s taking the party with him whether they want to go or not.

That includes Hillary.

Emerging Corruption Emerging Corruption – eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty