Long before there was the Affordable Care Act, presidential candidate and Democratic front-runner Secretary Hillary Clinton was advocating for her own version of health care reform, popularly known as “Hillarycare.” While the Clintons failed to successfully implement Hillarycare, a little over a decade later, President Barack Obama passed “Obamacare,” which effectively overhauled the United States health care system. While the general refrain in the media touted that Obamacare was different than Hillarycare, the two are actually very similar in structure and regulation.
In a new piece in National Affairs, AEI health expert Scott Gottlieb, MD explores the striking similarities between Obamacare and Hillarycare and what that means for Clinton in 2016:
Now that Clinton’s plan has largely seen its fruition in the passage of Obamacare, she will need to embrace the shared elements between her own plans and President Obama’s, while distancing herself from Obamacare’s problems. This will be no easy feat. But here again, her 1993 campaign for Hillarycare and the 2008 campaign for president provide a plan for moving forward — a populist attack on special interests. The message will likely go something like this: Obamacare successfully expanded access, but didn’t solve the problem of high costs. This is the fault of the health-care industry’s special interests, insurers and drug makers, who are profiting from the coverage expansion at the expense of “ordinary Americans.”
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Obamacare, like Hillarycare, principally asserted government control over the delivery of health care. Clinton’s 2016 platform will no doubt focus on exercising that control as a means to forcibly lower prices to make the coverage itself, in her words, more affordable. Of course, Obamacare’s problems go well beyond high prices. But even on the price issue, Clinton looks likely to offer yet another false premise. Prices aren’t rising because businesses are exploiting Obamacare, as Clinton seems set to profess, even if some might be. Prices are going up mostly because businesses are following the law’s dictates — rationally responding to an irrational framework that was largely invented by Hillary Clinton.
Read his full piece, “The Clintonian Roots of Obamacare.”
To arrange an interview with Scott Gottlieb, or another AEI health expert, please contact AEI media services at mediaservices@aei.org or 202.862.5829.
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