Bill Clinton on Obamacare: 'It Doesn't Make Any Sense'

Tyler O'Neil | 8:10 PM on October 03, 2016

*Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in 2013 (Image via Shutterstock)*

Former President Bill Clinton took a shot at Obamacare on Monday evening, calling it a “crazy system” that “doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. The insurance model doesn’t work here,” the former president declared at a campaign event in Flint, Michigan. He delved into the weaknesses of President Obama’s signature health legislation while campaigning for his wife.

You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.

Clinton argued that Obamacare “works fine” for those with “modest” incomes, who are eligible for government subsidies. But “the people that are getting killed in this deal are small businesspeople and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies.”

He presented the system from a health insurance company’s point of view, explaining why Obamacare incentivizes the companies to jack up prices.

If you were on the other side of this, if you were an insurer, you’d say, “Gosh, I only got two thousand people in this little pool. Eighty percent of the insurance costs here come from 20 percent of the people. If I get unlucky in the pool, I’ll lose money.”

So they overcharge you just to make sure, and in good years they just make a whoppin’ profit out of the people least able to pay it. It doesn’t make any sense. The insurance model doesn’t work here, it’s not like life insurance, it’s not like casualty, it’s not like predicting flood, it doesn’t work.

It is good to hear a Democrat admit the obvious about Obamacare’s failures, but it also seems to confirm the conservative rumors that President Obama’s measure intended to crash the healthcare system, in order to prepare the ground for a single-payer overhaul. Was the ex-president merely acknowledging the failures of one of his successors, or did he have something more nefarious in mind?

This isn’t the first time Clinton has attacked President Obama’s legacy. In March, the former president declared, “If you believe we can rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that, where we were practicing trickle-down economics, then you should vote for her.”