Hillary Clinton told a Miami radio station that she and President Obama had talked about it and decided that Obamacare’s problems like skyrocketing premiums, high deductibles, and non-existent competition could be fixed. “We’re going to make changes to fix problems like that,” she said.
That’s very comforting but what, specifically, can anyone do about it?
“We’re going to really tackle that,” she added. “We’re going to get co-pays and premiums and deductibles down. We’re going to tackle prescription drug costs. And we can do that without ripping away the insurance that people now have. That’s the plan of my opponent.”
Jonathan Gruber, a former key advisor on the law, said on CNN on Wednesday that one such fix would involve raising the penalty for people who forgo insurance, to get more healthy people paying into the system, which could lower costs for others.
Even under the rosiest scenarios for Democrats, most political analysts believe Republicans would retain control of the House, which has voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare. GOP leaders are under intense pressure from their core voters to keep pressure on defeating the law and have shown no appetite to work with Democrats to fix it.
Clinton certainly knows that. She went on to make another case for the law.
“Look, this is a major step forward: 20 million people” insured, she said. “And actually, I’m sure you noticed, predominantly working people, African American, Latino people now have access to insurance.”
Donald Trump , she argued, would “take everything away, give it all back to the insurance companies.”
No law ever passed by government gave more to multi-billion insurance companies than Obamacare. The government presented insurance companies with 30 million new customers — by law, forced to buy their product — and promised that if they didn’t make any money, the government would bail them out.
Thankfully, Republicans prevented most of the bailout. But Clinton acknowledged the basic problems with the law while failing to propose the obvious, and painful, solution.
Ratchet up the fine for not buying insurance to unbearable levels, forcing young, healthy citizens to buy what they may need, but don’t want.
Other fixes would be to eliminate some of the ridiculous mandates that every policy must have and allow the creation of policies tailored to young people: fairly high deductibles with basic catastrophic coverage. Democrats won’t hear of it, which is why Obamacare will continue to implode.
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