Giving up before she even gets started:
DES MOINES, Iowa – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a call for universal health care on Monday, plunging back into a political battle she memorably waged and lost as first lady more than a decade ago.
“This is not government-run,” Clinton said of her plan to extend coverage to an estimated 47 million Americans who now go without.
In other words, no single-payer health care for you. Oh, hell no!
“I know my Republican opponents will try to equate health care for all Americans with government-run health care. Don’t let them fool us again. This is not government-run.”
Please, please, please, Hillary exhorts, don’t accuse me of advocating single-payer health care.
…aides stress that no new federal bureaucracy would be created under the Clinton plan.
Thank effing God for that. If she tried to get universal single-payer health care she might get criticized. Oh wait…
Republican Mitt Romney, in New York City for a fundraising stop, criticized Clinton’s proposal, saying, “‘Hillary care’ continues to be bad medicine … in her plan, we have Washington-managed health care. Fundamentally, she takes her inspiration from European bureaucracies.”
The plan that Romney helped institute while governor of Massachusetts requires the same individual insurance mandate as Clinton’s and uses state subsidies to help reduce the cost of private coverage. Since then, Romney has said he would leave it up to the states to decide whether they supported such a mandate.
Said Republican Rudy Giuliani’s campaign: “Senator Clinton’s latest health scheme includes more government mandates, expensive federal subsidies and more big bureaucracy — in short, prescription for an increase in wait times, a decrease in patient care and tax hikes to pay for it all.”
You will rarely, if ever, get something unless you ask for it. This is what the candidates should say:
I will pursue the strongest health care plan that I can get through Congress. If I have to compromise on single-payer to insure all Americans, I will do so. But if you give me the White House and a filibuster proof Senate, I can assure you that every American will be fully insured, and businesses will no longer be saddled with crippling medical benefit costs that wind up costing us jobs and crippling economic growth.
Or something along those lines.