Give credit to Hillary Clinton for paying attention to her scars from her first tough tango with health care reform back in the 1990s — she has decided to enact a ‘big tent’ philosophy to either equally satisfy or equally annoy all the big players in the looming reform dance.
When I asked Clinton earlier today in a conference call with New Hampshire reporters — a day after she announced the final piece of her health care plan — if she was prepared for the political blowback she experienced during her first go around in 1993-1994 (remember the Harry and Louise commercials in which Clinton’s reform plan was compared to communists taking over and killing all the children), she sounded confident, like a politician who had all her bases covered in preparation for the “contortion” acts of the critics.
"They’re gonna have a much harder time,” she said about the long rhetorical knives her opponents are sharpening right now. The reason being is that those Americans happy with the status quo can stay that way and the rest will have choices to make.
Clinton released the plan in Iowa on Monday and it didn’t take long for the knives to come out. To borrow a movie title from the 1970s: ‘They shoot candidates with health care plans, don’t they?’
From the GOP side, Rudy Giuliani’s folks wanted me to know that their guy has no shortage of good, stand up material though his communications guru Katie Levinson pushed all the right political buttons in her rebuttal: “If you liked Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko,’ you’re going to love HillaryCare 2.0. Senator Clinton’s latest health scheme includes more government mandates, expensive federal subsidies and more big bureaucracy – in short, a prescription for an increase in wait times, a decrease in patient care and tax hikes to pay for it all.”
Not so, wrote Bill Hammond of the New York Daily News today, who chides Giuliani and Mitt Romney for drowning in their marketplace uber alles dogma — and compliments Clinton for making a broad attempt at political consensus.
Romney has derided the reform plans efforts of Clinton and other Dems as the “socialist” alternative: I mean really, Mitt, what century are you living in? And why do you run from the Massachusetts plan that you signed into law and looks remarkably similar in spirit to most Democratic reform plans? In this case, Romney isn’t so much a flip-flopper as an amnesiac.
Ah, but striving for that political consensus isn’t necessarily a virtue on the primary trail. Chris Dodd not-so-politely implies that Clinton lacks the leadership gravitas to get it done and John Edwards — well he essentially accuses her of being a bought and paid for lobbyist in disguise for the health care industry.
“If you’re going to negotiate universal health care with the same powerful interests that killed it before, your proposal isn’t a plan, it’s a starting point,” Edwards said Monday in Chicago in a health care reform speech of his own. “I’d like to know what a principled compromise looks like on universal health care. When you cut the deal on universal, who gets left out? And if you don’t compromise on the universal part, does that mean you compromise on the health care part? Lower quality? Higher costs? I don’t believe in it.”
Perhaps these Democratic sibligns should split the difference. Ezra Klein of The American Prospect writes today that what is changing is how the candidates are driving each other to offer more than yesterday’s cold reform soup.
Meanwhile, in true Clinton campaign fashion, the launch of this new product line (aka American Health Choices Plan) has been accompanied by a new TV ad in New Hampshire promoting her proposal and the unveiling of a new group, Granite State Health Corps to spread the gospel. But have no doubt about it: even if her plan leaves you yearning for more, she is serious and driven and determined to prevail.
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