So let me get this straight: The woman who invented Obamacare in 2008 -- a plan that Obama initially mocked and rejected as a candidate, before adopting it as president -- is going to waltz in and "fix" the mess that she created, and has recently claimed is "working" for consumers? Sure. She has no credibility on this issue, and no good answers. But given the predictable crisis precipitated by Obamacare's harmful failures, she has no choice but to say things like this to anxious voters:
"We’re going to make changes to fix problems like that," Clinton said in an interview Wednesday with WHQT HOT 105.1 Miami. "The president and I have talked 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.
Republicans should urge Democrats to follow the advice of known liar Jonathan Gruber, who recommends that Washington raise the individual mandate tax penalty on people who can't afford the unpopular, unaffordable law they jammed through on a party-line vote. Punish people harder; that'll be popular. How about it, Democrats? Propose it. I dare you. And Hillary's promises sound awfully familiar don't they? Lower costs! People can keep their plans! This was all part of the original, dishonest Obamacare pitch that is disintegrating before our very eyes. Besides inflicting more painful tax penalties on middle class and working class consumers (and backdoor bailouts), Democrats are also suggesting even more government control, requiring more taxpayer dollars, to create a "public option" on the exchanges. This government program would undercut private insurer rates with massive taxpayer subsidies, driving even more providers away from the law -- and tempting more employers to dump their employees into government-sponsored programs. Currently, the tens of millions of Americans who have employer-provided coverage have only been impacted by relatively modest premium hikes (underscoring another broken promise). If the public option "solution" is imposed by Democrats, many millions will lose their existing plans, and will be dumped into the Obamacare mess. It is, and should be, a non-starter for Congressional Republicans. We discussed the richness of Hillary pretending that she can rectify these problems on today's episode of Outnumbered:
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As I've said before, Hillary Clinton is the Godmother of Obamacare. I'll leave you with this interactive map tracking premium increases, and a telling quote from Aetna's CEO:
Healthier people will avoid buying Affordable Care Act health insurance plans as premiums climb, threatening the stability of the market, Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini said. “As the rates rise, the healthier people pull out because the out-of-pocket costs aren’t worth it,” Bertolini said at Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead Summit in New York. “Young people can do the math. Gas for the car, beer on Fridays and Saturdays, health insurance.”
Yup. And if something terrible should befall them, insurers must cover them in the next open enrollment, by law. Young, healthy people look at the exorbitant prices, understand the dynamics, and choose not to spend thousands of dollars a year on "coverage" that wouldn't even kick in until they'd exhausted big deductibles anyway. The unaffordability of the "Affordable" Care Act is the driving factor of its slow demise. And the phenomenon described in that quotation explains why major insurers are abandoning the failing law. One of the best things Donald Trump said in any of the three debates is that Obamacare cannot be fixed. He's right.
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