Bill Clinton Calls Obamacare ‘The Craziest Thing in the World’
Major complications in the law has caused Democrats to sour on Obamacare.
Republicans have fought against Obamacare from the beginning, but now Democrats have started to pile on. President Bill Clinton recently lashed out at the system at a rally in Michigan:
“You’ve got this crazy system where all the sudden 25 million more people have healthcare 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,” Clinton said.
“It’s the craziest thing in the world,” he said.
Clinton also told the people he supports “an entirely new approach:”
“We gotta figure out what to do now on healthcare,” he said, adding that the current system only “works fine” if people are receiving the ObamaCare subsidies or are enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid.
“The people who are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little bit too much to get any of these subsidies,” he said, arguing that the law does not give any new bargaining power for people struggling to pay their healthcare costs.
The law has faced new complications in the last few months. Last week, Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman made similar remarks:
Clinton’s comments in Michigan follow officials in nearby Minnesota recently agreeing to huge price hikes in order to convince insurers to stay. Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman announced Friday that individual market plans could raise rates as high as 67 percent next year. The jump in cost follows this year’s hike of 14 percent to 49 percent.
In a written statement, Rothman, who serves in a Democratic administration, said middle-class residents are getting “crushed” and called for urgent reforms in the state’s individual market.
“This year the need for reform is now without any doubt even more serious and urgent,” Rothman said. He called the soaring rates “unsustainable and unfair,” while saying the steps they took were necessary to “avert a collapse this year” – after the state’s largest health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, announced it would stop selling health plans to individuals and families in 2017 and other insurers had threatened to follow.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison had to cut student worker hours “to conform to requirements” of Obamacare. In August, Aetna announced it planned to slash some of its Obamacare to exchange offerings because the company has lost $430 million:
“Following a thorough business review and in light of a second-quarter pretax loss of $200 million and total pretax losses of more than $430 million since January 2014 in our individual products, we have decided to reduce our individual public exchange presence in 2017, which will limit our financial exposure moving forward. More than 40 payers of various sizes have similarly chosen to stop selling plans in one or more rating areas in the individual public exchanges over the 2015 and 2016 plan years, collectively exiting hundreds of rating areas in more than 30 states. As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” said Aetna in an official statement.
Aetna will only offer exchanges in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, and Virginia. UnitedHealthcare “announced plans to withdraw from most exchanges” last April.
Of course, though, the Democrats have now decided the public option as a way to fix the mess. They wanted it in the original Obamacare bill, but it did not survive. Sen. Jeff Merkley (R-OR) proposed the new public option resolution, but it likely will not survive since the GOP controls Congress.
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To which the Democrats response is: “more government!”
As in, single-payer.
When Bill says, “We gotta figure out what to do now on healthcare,” he means single-payer. He certainly doesn’t mean any of the ideas more conservative health care analysts have put forward over the years.
This is just a set up to get the Bernie voters to pull the lever for Hillary — “after the election we’ll fix Obamacare and you’ll love it!” It’s not a “public option”, it’s mandatory single payer. That’s what the hard core Left has wanted all along.
Ahhh yes… Single payer.
Just ask any vet on great single payer is! And I speak from personal experience that it sucks PERIOD…
“It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.
Wul, yah.
Just EXACTLY like we told you Deemocrats. Years ago. Often, and repeatedly.
We were told that tens-of-thousands of Americans were dying every year without “health insurance”, which was a damned lie.
Just scrap the whole ObamaDoggle mess, and let the markets work. DECREASE regulation at the Federal and state levels to the bare minimum that protects people, and trust the market to deliver, as it just MAGICALLY (to the idiots who don’t get it) DOES.
Vote #NeverTrump! She’ll fix it.
The problem is in defining “the bare minimum that protects people”. It would be nice if a discussion about that could be had, but the Dems will never stop Demagoguing the issue.
I found out yesterday that our monthly premium is going up by 50%.
And that is on top of the 30% increase last year.
I call that the October surprise that the media can’t ignore or cover up.
A-yup.
Our premiums are undergoing a similar “adjustment.” The underwriters and bean counters found that their “single” insureds were paying a disproportionally-high amount compared to families — a single person was paying just over half the family rate.
So their solution (naturally) is to “adjust” the family rate to around 150% the current amount, and leave the single rate unaffected.
I’m supposed to get my annual pay raise by the end of the year, and that raise should just cover the premium “adjustment” (they’re going out of their way to NOT call it an increase). We won’t be financially any better off next year.
…and of course the GOP is Johnny-come-lately as they should be crying loudly, “We Told You So!”
(snort)
It is now the duty of the Democrats and RINOs to pretend this is all the conservatives fault and the conservatives need to fix it. Using the handy dandy Democrat plan in this here drawer. That calls for massive taxation and price and occupational controls on medical professionals and facilities.
The health penalty tax a.k.a. Obamacare. At issue is the government’s regulation of insurance companies that creates an incentive for inflated costs. While this is the principle cause, the issues are comprehensive ranging from domestic to foreign policies. Obamacare is to the medical sector, as progressive debt, enabled by Fannie Mae et al, was to affordable housing. The central issue is the gross misalignment between wealth and leverage driven by a secular “religious/moral” philosophy of instant gratification.
He’s not wrong, though didn’t he appoint his wife to do more or less the same thing when he was Pres?
We need to start referring him to him as the disgraced former, impeached president with rape charges trailing behind him.
…like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
Watch the fun when they start penalizing people for smoking, drinking, and not exercising. People will have to log so much time on the treadmill in return for food stamps. Just wait and see. Livestock.
No, people will be able to purchase “exercise/health credits”, much like they buy “carbon credits” as penance to atone for their environmental sins.
In other words, it’d be only the “little people” who pay full freight – just like it is in all the progressives’ hare-brained schemes ~
Yes, this is the way they’ll control society. Health coverage will be denied to those engaging in “risky” behavior. Sounds reasonable, right? Saves us all money, so can’t be bad…
Except that “risky behavior” would be determined by an EPA-style bureaucracy which can do whatever it wants. Cut down on driving? The global warming scare didn’t do, and neither did attempts to jack gas prices up to the $9/gal range; so just define driving as “risky behavior”. Then only the rich (defined as those who can afford to pay their full medical bills) will be able to afford to drive. Flying? Cut down that disastrous carbon footprint by declaring flying as “risky behavior”. Gun ownership? “Risky behavior”; no insurance for you. Heterosexual sex? Oops, you’re pregnant; too bad about that “risky behavior” but you’ll have to pay for the lil’ tyke on your own.
Nice going, Bill! Way to chop the legs out from under your wife!
Old rapin’ Willy Jeff just can’t seem to keep his mouth shut these days. Don’t see much of that smarmy charm anymore either. It’s almost time for America’s favorite con artist (sorry, Donald) to grab the gold and skip to a warm tropical island with no extradition agreements.
Obamacare is failing, so the dems go back to a public option as the answer. Why, it’s almost as if the whole thing was planned that way.
No, the idea of Hillary Clinton as president is the craziest idea in the world.