Hillary Clinton’s lead over Bernie Sanders has all but melted away and she’s running scared, in the same way she panicked as Barack Obama was overtaking her. This time, instead of Bill Clinton being the one to deliver the hit, it is Chelsea:
In her first stump speech of the 2016 race, Chelsea Clinton is accusing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) of trying to scrap President Obama’s signature healthcare law in favor of a single-payer system.
“Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare,” Clinton said Tuesday in New Hampshire, according to NBC News, at an event marking her first stop along the campaign trail.
https://youtu.be/kaoZvKY2za0
The former first daughter referred to a bill that Sanders has three times introduced, which would replace Affordable Care Act programs with a new national American Health Security Trust Fund, which would allow states to run their own single-payer systems with federal dollars.
Team Clinton attacks Sanders on healthcare — from the right
Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders from the right on healthcare ahead of next month’s Democratic caucuses in Iowa.
The Democratic presidential front-runner’s campaign is blasting her chief rival’s failure to address how he’d pay for a single-payer healthcare system. She argued he would have to impose steep tax increases to come up with the money.
“We think the voters in Iowa should be able to hear how Sen. Sanders would pay for that proposal,” Brian Fallon, the campaign’s national spokesman, said Wednesday in a phone briefing on the issue.
Clinton’s senior policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on the call that Sanders is refusing to disclose his plan’s price tag because the details are “politically difficult,” with potentially trillions of dollars of new spending and hefty new tax hikes.
Read the rest on TheHill.com
Hillary Clinton Is Botching Her Best Chance To Win
Not again.
By Jason Linkins and Jack Carter
Conventional wisdom, 2007: Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination in a cakewalk. Conventional wisdom, 2015: Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination in a cakewalk.
Everybody knows what happened to the conventional wisdom once 2007 turned to 2008. Certainly Clinton does. This time around, even as she amassed advantages that may still prove insurmountable, her campaign put forth a strong message: “We get it. We’ve changed.”
But after a promising start, Clinton’s campaign has taken an abrupt, confused, strategic turn. And a familiar crassness has returned to a campaign that now appears to be bent on ensuring a repeat of 2008 in 2016.
Read the rest of this article on HuffPo.
Zaid Jilani of the Intercept writes:
Hillary Clinton’s Single-Payer Pivot Greased By Millions in Industry Speech Fees
Hillary Clinton’s sudden attack on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan is a dramatic break with Democratic Party doctrine that the problem with single-payer is that it is politically implausible — not that it is a bad idea.
Single-payer, the Canadian-style system in which the government pays for universal health care, takes the health insurance industry out of the picture, saving huge amounts of money. But the health insurance industry has become so rich and powerful that it would never let it happen.
That was certainly Clinton’s position back in the early 1990s, when she was developing her doomed universal coverage proposal for her husband, Bill.
But in the ensuing years, both Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton alone, from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the industry.
Read the rest on TheIntercept.
Unnamed sources have been casting aspersions on Senator Sanders’ healthcare for days now. Even Hillary has criticized it. So, today, Politifact settles the matter for us:
How much would Bernie Sanders’ health care plan cost the middle class?
Prescribed savings
Sanders proposes to expand Medicare, the health safety net that covers those over 65, to all Americans. He hasn’t released a full plan yet, but he points to previous legislation he’s introduced, namely a 2013 bill for a single-payer Medicare-for-all system, as his general gameplan.
To pay for it, Sanders would impose broad-based taxes: a 6.7 percent payroll tax on employers and a 2.2 percent tax on individual incomes under $200,000 or joint incomes under $250,000. (Progressively higher rates for higher-income earners are described in his 2013 bill.)
Sanders’ campaign says his Medicare-for-all plan would save the average American family $3,855 to $5,173 in annual health care costs.
Read the rest of Politifact’s analysis here.
January 14, 2016, 04:56 pm
Clinton campaign decries Sanders’s ‘negative ad’
By Jesse Byrnes
Clinton’s aides claimed Sanders had broken his pledge to never run a negative advertisement by releasing his 30-second campaign spot on “two Democratic visions for regulating Wall Street.”
“We were very surprised today to see that Bernie Sanders had launched a negative television advertisement against Hillary,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters on a phone call.
“We were particularly surprised because he had personally pledged, and his campaign had pledged, never to run a negative advertisement,” Mook added, arguing Sanders did “break that pledge.”
Sanders’s campaign insisted that the ad wasn’t “directed at Secretary Clinton exclusively.”
Read the rest of this article on TheHill.com
Hillary Clinton Interview with Rachel Maddow, January 14, 2016
About three minutes in, Rachel asks Clinton about her campaign casting aspersions on Bernie Sanders.