Not to be a Buzz Kill, but didn't HRC want Medicare at 55, and add a Public Option for any age? nt

[Celerity]

13. Normally I agree with you, but I think you would have a hard time convincing the Sanderites the NYT

is

'Sanders-Centric'

I am aware that she deffo (as did Obama) pushed for the Public Option in 2008

Also, my reply was simply meant to show that the OP was correct at the end of the day, albeit with some nuance that I shall endeavour here to explain.

She did not initially push it initially to any great degree last go-round, (and to her great credit she did re-emphasise it later on) but I would be remiss to not point out that her new form of public option she then put up was on a state by state level (thus Red States could block it by not opting in), and thus does not resemble Biden's in 2020.

I also want to state I am NOT taking Bernie's side in any of this. his Medicare for All will never pass, not for decades, if ever.

I am just giving (or attempting to give) a more fully fleshed-out timeline and detailed backgrounding

Sometimes, at least to me, any form of detailed, complex, multi-dimensional colloquy (NOT saying from you at all Sir do this in the slightest) seems to lost on the all or nothing, 100% slam anything (even if it involves problematic statements not backed up by facts) or anyone a person disagrees with into the ground. I am simply incapable of operating at that level, much to my detriment at times here, unfortunately.

Also, as I have said repeatedly (and given a lot of detail as to why I think that way) I do not believe the public option will pass, even if we take back the Senate by a 51-49 or 52-48 margain and hold the House, although the coronaviral nightmare may have given it a FAR better chance of finally passing, IF we play our cards right.

So now, back to Sec. Clinton (your link was from 2010, which was not the timeframe I was discussing):


Hillary Clinton Once Again Backs the Public Option. (I bolded a part in this to show that this article is hostile to Sander's MFA, and none of my articles come from Sanders fanboys/girls)

https://slate.com/business/2016/02/hillary-clinton-once-again-backs-the-public-option-what-took-so-long.html

Hillary Clinton is once again embracing the public option. As Politico noticed Monday, the presidential candidate has added a section to her website stating that she still supports the concept of creating a government-run health plan to compete against private insurers, which she also backed backed during her 2008 campaign.

The public option was a deeply popular idea among progressives during the legislative battles over the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010. Advocates argued it would lower costs and possibly serve as a bridge toward a single-payer system. The proposal also polled extremely well with the public. But it died rather brutally thanks to opposition from more conservative Senate Democrats, including Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, and independent Joe Lieberman. (In its place, we got Obamacare’s nonprofit health care co-ops, which seem to have been a flop so far.)

Given liberals’ infatuation with the public option, the most surprising thing about Clinton’s move is that it didn’t happen sooner. (Journalists have been wondering for a while why she hasn’t been pushing the idea.) Like much of her policy agenda, Clinton’s health care platform has suffered from the lack of a decent marketing hook. Everybody knows that Bernie Sanders is in favor of a national single-payer program, which, while both politically and logistically impracticable, is at least pretty easy for voters to understand and maybe get excited about. Clinton, on the other hand, talks about using the existing framework of the Affordable Care Act to push the country toward universal coverage and offers an array of targeted, wonk-approved ideas to do so, none of which are especially catchy. (Bulking up premium tax credits for people who buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, as she’d like to do, would be really, really helpful, but proposing it won’t exactly fill a stadium with cheering college kids.)

Throwing her arms around the public option should help Clinton with that problem. When Sanders talks about Medicare for all, Clinton can now talk about finally making the public option a reality, which might be the tiniest bit more plausible. Obviously, a Republican Congress would never abide. But Clinton suggests she’ll try to scoot around Capitol Hill by working “with interested governors, using current flexibility under the Affordable Care Act, to empower states to establish a public option choice.” This is an interesting approach—liberals occasionally talked about the idea of state-based public options in the years immediately after Obamacare’s passage—that would presumably take advantage of the ACA’s innovation waivers. Whether it would do much to advance the cause of health reform is hard to say—state versions of the public option would enroll fewer patients than a federal plan and thus would have less power to negotiate with health care providers and save money. But progress is progress.

snip



Hillary Clinton re-embraces the public option for health care

https://qz.com/622181/can-hillary-clinton-really-cover-the-last-10-with-obamacare/

snip

One answer for Clinton is a public health insurance option: a popular progressive solution to drive down health care costs that Clinton enthusiastically supported while running for president in 2008. It was not included in her health care policy roll-out—at least at first. After Quartz asked last week why the idea didn’t merit a mention by Clinton’s campaign website, it was updated to reference the public option. ”We regularly update our website with additional details on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions,” a spokesperson said.

During a January debate, Clinton said that “even when the Democrats were in charge of the Congress, we couldn’t get the votes for [the public option].” And previously, her aides have been diffident, with national spokesperson Brian Fallon brushing aside a query about the public option on MSNBC—”Sure. Public option, sure.”—to explain that Clinton and Sanders agree about the need to cover everyone.

snip

During the Obamacare debate, some saw a public insurance option as a good halfway point to maximize the efficiency of single-payer without driving insurance companies out of business. The idea’s eventual failure was celebrated by some health care wonks who saw it as a distraction from the more important parts of health insurance reform.

Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician who chairs the health policy department at the University of Pennsylvania and was one of the White House advisers behind the Affordable Care Act, told Quartz that a strong public option was too threatening to insurers, while the non-profit health care co-ops that were created as their substitute have largely failed. “In lieu of a public option, we ended up creating the co-ops, they’re not doing great,” said Emanuel, citing a variety of reasons for their failures, from a lack of sufficient funding to poor rules and mismanagement. He declined to comment on who he was backing in the presidential race.

An attempt to revive the debate over the public option would ”get back into the same dilemma that sort of torpedoed that before: using the Medicare price system [which is cheaper than what insurance companies pay], they have an advantage. If you don’t use a Medicare pricing system, why is it any better than the insurance companies we have out there?” Emanuel added.

snip




Clinton revives support for health care 'public option'

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/hillary-clinton-health-care-bernie-sanders-219643

Hillary Clinton wants to bring back the public option, offering a competing vision to Bernie Sanders’ support for a more progressive health care system.

Clinton's campaign has updated its website to note her continued support for the government-run health plan that was dropped from Obamacare during the law's drafting. The idea was popular among progressives who prefer a single-payer plan -- like the one Bernie Sanders is touting.

Clinton supported the public option in her 2008 presidential campaign, and during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act a year later, Congress debated allowing a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. However, the public option was eliminated from the legislation because of objections from moderate Senate Democrats who opposed a greater government role in providing health care. But Clinton has hardly referenced her previous support for the idea during the 2016 campaign, and instead has called for building on President Barack Obama’s health care law.

A new version of Clinton’s campaign website suggests she won't try to push the public option through Congress, but instead will work with governors using existing flexibility under Obamacare "to empower states to establish a public option choice." That may be a reference to a waiver program taking effect in 2017 that lets states assert greater control over their health care systems. It appears that the campaign updated its website's health care platform in the past week to note Clinton's support for the public option.

snip



Hillary Clinton Revives The Public Option -- But As An Experiment
(Forbes is very anti-Bernie, and pretty anti-public option as well)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/03/03/hillary-clinton-revives-the-public-option-but-as-an-experiment/#436236b24414

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has revived recently the idea of adding a “public option” to the Exchanges. Apparently, at least for now, she would permit or perhaps encourage each state to create a publicly operated insurer that would augment private insurers in selling health insurance policies to individuals. Her website suggests she would not mandate a public option at the federal level -- at least for now -- or somehow force the states to create one. All of that would require her to push legislation through Congress. The "encouraged" public option, by contrast, could be implemented by cooperation between states and the federal executive without a need for any revisions to the Affordable Care Act. As set forth here, adoption of Hillary's public option is likely to disrupt insurance markets and healthcare rather than improve them, but it is not such an obvious Frankenstein of an experiment that conservatives ought to stand in the way of its voluntary adoption by states beguiled by the program's apparent benevolence.

While it is hard to imagine liberals objecting to candidate Clinton's idea except insofar as it displaces more fundamental reform, her proposal places two conservative ideas in tension: federalism and free markets. On the one hand, conservatives might well say, if a state is foolish enough to attempt a public option, that's up to the democratic processes of each state. It won't have any great effect on other states and, besides, the little state laboratories might actually evolve something that could work. On the other hand, conservatives might say that public operated insurance companies have a pretty miserable record in other markets -- anyone want to look at the finances of the National Flood Insurance Program or some of the issues faced by Florida's Citizens Property Insurance Corporation or Texas's Windstorm Insurance Association? Their insertion into the market is likely to kill off private competition and leave consumers with an inefficient, expensive program. Indeed, those conservatives might suspect that, as some have alleged with respect to Obamacare itself, the public option is a "see-we-tried-a-compromise" plan whose inevitable failure paves the way to liberal Nirvana: a single payor system.

To understand the merits and deficiencies of the public option, let’s harken back to the end of the pre-ACA period when Congress and others debated how to reform American healthcare Recall the ideological premise motivating proponents of the constellation of ideas that coalesced in what became the Affordable Care Act: The main problem with American healthcare lies in the insurance market and the lupine insurers who run it. The main way to get individual healthcare expenses under control and provide greater access to healthcare is to make insurance cheaper through insurance subsidies, prohibitions on medical underwriting and greater insurer competition through open markets.

And, here is where the public option makes its entrance. We can’t necessarily trust private insurers to compete or provide the benefit packages many consumers desire. Private insurers will spend money on whatever underwriting survives the new law; they will "waste money" on marketing; and they need -- gasp -- profits. So, we need a public insurer that will act in the public interest and has enough market power to beat down powerful providers such as hospitals and they-who-shall-not-be-named -- pharmaceutical companies.

snip



and there are a LOT more from places that are not in the tank for Bernie, then, or now, there is not attempt at a Sanderite re-write from them or me


http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/public-option-makes-comeback-clintons-endorsement

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/clinton-reaffirms-support-for-public-option.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/09/politics/hillary-clinton-health-care-public-option-bernie-sanders/index.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-to-back-public-option-for-health-care/