Hillary Clinton Fingerprints On Obamacare, Senator Declares [Video]

Hillary Clinton deserves credit for Obamacare becoming law, according to retiring U.S. Senator and Clinton supporter Tom Harkin.

Clinton visited Iowa last weekend for fellow Democrat Harkin’s annual steak fry and as a possible precursor to a presidential run.

Republican Joni Ernst, a military veteran and Obamacare foe, is reportedly polling ahead of Clinton-endorsed Democrat lawyer Bruce Braley in the election campaign to succeed Harkin in Washington.

Against the backdrop of canceled plans, higher premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, and limited provider networks, Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, continues to be unpopular with the American public. Tens of thousands of Americans across the country happy (or reasonably satisfied) with their existing coverage who saw their insurance wiped out under Obamacare have been forced into new plans and required by government edict to pay extra for coverage they neither want or need given their age or gender. When the postponed employer mandate kicks in as we near January 1, 2015, millions of workers with job-based coverage will face the same premium-hike-related challenges as will the companies that provide the coverage, some of whom may transition workers into Healthcare.gov or a state-level exchange instead.

During the administration of her husband Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton was put in charge of the president’s healthcare reform task force that advocated what became known as Hillarycare, a failed initiative that was a precursor to Obamacare. According to the University of Arkansas archives, there is some dispute as to whether Mrs. Clinton favors or doesn’t favor a single-payer system (i.e., a completely government-run program).

As the Inquisitr separately reported this week, Hillary Clinton staffers at the U.S. State Department have been accused of purging potentially damaging documents related to the Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attack in which four Americans were murdered on September 11, 2012. Pat Smith, the mother of slain foreign service officer Sean Smith, has previously accused Hillary Clinton of responsibility for the killing of her son at the embassy compound.

In his remarks to a crowd of 5,000 last weekend, Harkin alluded to the fact that he and then-Senator Clinton served together on the Senate committee that worked on healthcare issues.

“One of the things she always worked on was advancing this concept, this idea that health care should be a right and not a privilege in this country. So, Hillary was not there when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, she was of course secretary of state, but I want you all to know that her fingerprints are all over that legislation. It would not have happened without her strenuous advocacy in that committee all those years.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh4DiqatEvo

In other Obamacare news, a 2014 survey of U.S. doctors found that about 46 percent gave Obamacare a D or an F grade, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement, although physicians and patients are often not on the same page.

In Minnesota, PreferredOne, the primary Obamacare insurance company in that state is bailing out on the MNsure healthcare exchange, with the CEO indicating that “continuing to provide this coverage through MNsure is not sustainable.”

Responding to this development, the Powerline blog contended that “Individuals with PreferredOne policies purchased on the exchange will see those policies automatically renewed, unless they do something different. The catch is that, with PreferredOne no longer participating in MNSure, those people will no longer be eligible for Obamacare subsidies, so they will see premium increases — in many cases, huge ones… Ultimately, the awful economics of the law can’t be denied. Premiums and deductibles will rise, and coverages will shrink, insofar as they are able to given the law’s expansive and sometimes irrational mandates. By 2017, when the federal government will stop reimbursing insurance companies’ losses, premiums will be far higher than when Obamacare went into effect.”

In another recent development, an estimated 250,000 Virginia residents will have to find new health insurance policies that comply with one-size-fits-all Obamacare rules. “The problem stems from the line that people kept hearing before the Affordable Care Act was put in place that says, “if you like your plan, you can keep it.” It turns out that’s not true for thousands of Virginia companies and individuals,” NBC News affiliate WVIR in Charlottesville, Va., reported.

Presumed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has to some degree tried to find daylight from certain Obama administration policies. With regard to Harkin’s Obamacare claim, however, the Western Journalism Center noted that “If Hillary was looking to distance herself from Obama, the retiring five-term Iowa Senator just put her at the ‘scene of the crime.”

Do you think that Sen. Tom Harkin’s assertion that Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints are all over Obamacare is helpful to her presidential aspirations?

[image credit: Venl]