By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--January 13, 2016
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As Hillary Clinton's campaign continues to shake apart, it's becoming clear that the confidence she displays in public is slipping away behind the scenes. With New Hampshire polling showing her trailing crazy coot Bernie Sanders in every major demographic, she's shifting into attack mode. Every attack needs a weapon, so she's calling out the big guns. No it's not Bill.
It's her daughter, Chelsea.Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire on behalf of her mother, Hillary Clinton, ostensibly to tout the campaign's early childhood education plan. But she took sharp aim at Sanders, who advocates for a single-payer system that would place control of health care in the hands of the federal government. "I never thought we would be arguing about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in the Democratic primary," Clinton told Democrats in Manchester, one of three stops she made during her swing. She said Sanders would "dismantle" Obamacare, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and Medicare -- along with private insurance programs.
For the last few weeks, Clinton has been attacking Sanders over his longtime advocacy for single-payer health care. That's a system in which everybody, or almost everybody, gets insurance directly from a government-run program. Countries like Taiwan, Sweden and Canada have single-payer. The U.S. has a version of it in Medicare, which serves the elderly and disabled. Many progressives have long dreamed of extending it to everybody else. Some even call it "Medicare for all." During his Senate career, Sanders has repeatedly introduced single-payer legislation -- most recently in 2013, when he introduced the American Health Security Act. And while Sanders has also voted for less ambitious measures, including the Affordable Care Act, he has always envisioned those initiatives as incremental steps toward a single-payer system.The really fun part of this is that, prior to 2008, Hillary had long argued in favor of pretty much exactly what Bernie wants. As Hillary said in 1994:
"I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country. And regardless of the referendum outcome in California, it will be such a huge popular issue in the sense of populist issue that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be. So for those who think that building on the existing public-private system with an employer mandate is radical, I think they are extremely short-sighted, but that is their choice. ...The market cannot deliver universal coverage in the foreseeable future, and any compromise that people try to suggest that would permit the market to have a few years to try to deliver universal coverage without a mandate that would take effect to actually finish the job will guarantee a single payer heath care system."So what does all of this mean? It means Hillary and her DNC-elite allies are genuinely scared. Bernie's primary performance has been better than anyone expected and, while Hillary's still the odds-on favorite, embarrassing losses in Iowa and New Hampshire could spell real trouble. If internal polling showed Hillary with a commanding lead, she'd have no reason to launch such a transparent attack. Since they've chosen this path, the Clinton campaign must be looking at some truly terrible numbers. Even Axelrod is calling them out....
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