Friday, April 15, 2016

Money Doesn't Influence Her - Part 2

Part 1 here.
Single-payer [health iinsurance plan], the Canadian-style system in which the government pays for universal health care, takes the health insurance industry out of the picture, saving huge amounts of money. But the health insurance industry has become so rich and powerful that it would never let it happen.

That was certainly Clinton’s position back in the early 1990s, when she was developing her doomed universal coverage proposal for her husband, Bill.

But in the ensuing years, both Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton alone, from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the industry.

[...]

Also in 1993, two physician advocates for single-payer lobbied her during a meeting at the White House. They said she told them they made a “convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?”

The next year, in response to a question at a financial conference, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton said that if there was not a health care overhaul “by the year 2000 we will have a single-payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t think it’s a close call politically. I think the momentum for a single-payer system will sweep the country.”

  The Intercept
Only it didn't. Obama got in the way.
In 2008, a young medical student named Lisa Goldman queried Clinton about health care during an event she held in New Haven, Connecticut. Goldman told the Boston Globe that Clinton said she believed the plan to be politically unfeasible at the time, however if a bill establishing it reached her desk, she would sign it into law.
And then, apparently she got paid.
“We don’t have one size fits all; our country is quite diverse. What works in New York City won’t work in Albuquerque,” she told an assorted audience of 20,000 employees of the electronic health records industry on February 26, 2014; the speech earned her $225,500.

[...]

Hillary Clinton’s paid speech circuit came to an end as her campaign revved up. But for her husband, with whom she shares a bank account, it hasn’t. This summer, he was the keynote speaker at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry group that poured almost $100 million into trying to defeat health care reforms during the fight over the Affordable Care Act.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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