Poor Hillary Clinton! You know the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee really wants a government-run, single-payer health care system just like all leftists, including President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, 81 percent of Democrats, and especially her arch-rival, Bernie Sanders.
But she’s stuck campaigning for a new and improved Obamacare in an effort not to alienate her former boss who is well known for throwing close associates under the bus—can you say Reverend Jeremiah Wright or former terrorist Bill Ayers?
So Clinton has decided to dust off an old Al Gore proposal from the late 1990s, when Gore was looking for a vote-buying scheme for his coming presidential campaign: let the “near-elderly”—the term used then, though I preferred “pre-seniors”—buy into the Medicare program.
At least Gore had a point back then. Health insurance for older individuals who had to buy their own policies was very expensive, because health insurers in most states could charge more for older ages and health conditions—or deny coverage altogether.
The problem was that Medicare was very expensive if a person was to pay the full cost, and there were no Obamacare subsidies to defray part of that cost, so for most seniors a Medicare buy-in would be unaffordable.
And there was another problem: the Medicare program was financially unsustainable, even when the economy was roaring. It’s in even worse shape today. So allowing people to buy into the program without fixing its finances was a non-starter.
But that was a time when Democrats still cared about budgets and federal debt, or at least claimed they did. Those days are gone. Today Democrats want to expand Social Security to more people and provide even richer benefits. And they want to do the same with Medicare.
At least, that’s what they say out loud. The real goal behind Clinton’s proposal is to push the whole country closer to a “Medicare for all” single-payer system.
The plan was to expand the Medicaid health insurance program for the poor to more people, which Obamacare achieved—although 19 states are still fighting that effort.
And then leftists would lower the age requirements on Medicare, which Clinton is proposing, leaving fewer and fewer people with private-sector health insurance.
Given Obamacare’s exploding costs, shrinking networks of physicians, and fleeing health insurers, eventually even those remaining few would be begging to get into Medicare.
Hillary Clinton wants to turn the health care system over to the government, a government she hopes to be running. The only real difference between her initiative and Sanders’ Medicare for all is Hillary plans to take a little longer getting there.