Hillary Clinton touts universal health care at Geisinger conference
Harrisburg Bureau
DANVILLE, Pa. — Hillary Clinton knows a thing or two about pain.
Not just the soul-piercing kind that comes from losing to an opponent after describing yourself as the last thing standing between Americans and the apocalypse. The broken-foot kind. The former Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. senator and secretary of state walked gingerly across the stage at the “From Crisis to Cure” health care symposium at the Geisinger Medical Center campus on Thursday after having fractured her foot in October during her book tour in London.
The overriding lesson she has learned from studying — and using — the world’s health care systems is that “you have to have” a universal one that leaves no one out, she said during the conference’s keynote conversation.
The Affordable Care Act was clearly a compromise, she said, but “it got us to 90 percent coverage.”
She continued, “when people stand up and say, ‘We need single-payer and we need to blow up the whole system,’ my thought is, ‘Why don’t we get from 90 to 100 [percent coverage] before we try to go from zero to 100?’”
Mrs. Clinton spearheaded an ultimately unsuccessful healthcare reform effort in the early 90s during the presidency of her husband Bill Clinton. She has not backed a plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for a single-payer system known as Medicare-for-all.
Instead, she has said the U.S. should begin by buttressing the Affordable Care Act, offering a public option and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare.
Geisinger’s three-day conference is taking place during the second week of open enrollment in the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, marketplace, which will have the shortest enrollment period in the program’s five years amid vastly reduced federal funding for advertising and promoting it.
The Republican-controlled Congress has tried, and failed, to repeal and replace the healthcare law several times since the election of President Donald Trump.
More than 600,000 people selected Obamacare plans during four days last week in the 39 states that use the federal HealthCare.gov enrollment platform, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported Thursday. That level of participation far surpassed enrollment during the equivalent week last year.
During a broad conversation with Geisinger CEO David Feinberg that ranged from what she eats for dinner to her ideas for addressing the opioid crisis, Mrs. Clinton said she was “shocked at the level of ignorance that was displayed by people advocating for the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act,” which she attributed in part to “toxic” politics and an ill-informed debate.
“We’re living right now at a time when evidence and reason are somehow considered our adversaries,” she said. “There is no such thing as alternative facts. It is time that people stood up and said that.”