“As you can imagine, Bernie was skeptical of a centrist Bill Clinton running for president in 1992, and immediately after Clinton won the election and appointed Hillary to lead health care reform, Bernie set to work attempting to convince her of the virtue of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system. As you can probably also imagine, he wasn’t successful. Still, please do read what follows. The dialogue between Hillary and a Harvard Medical School physician supporting single-payer — accompanying Bernie to his meeting at the White House — is important for the record.
They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ”
Original caption: At Gillinghams, Hillary met with store manager Jireh Billings, left. Pols from left are Bernie Sanders, Pat Leahy and Gov. Dean as published June 24, 1993. (Rick Russell/ Vermont Standard)
When Bernie met Hillary
Long before challenging Clinton, Sanders reached out to her on health care. He got nowhere.
Three Rich Treasury Secretaries Laugh It Up Over Income Inequality
09/04/2015
LOL. Peasants!
Three of the world’s richest and most powerful people (and Timothy Geithner) had a good laugh over income inequality earlier this year.
Former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson and Geithner were asked about the issue by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg during a conference in Beverly Hills. When Paulson responded that he’d been working on income inequality since his days at Goldman Sachs, Geithner quipped, “In which direction?”
“You were increasing it!” cracked Rubin, as everyone on stage roared with laughter.
Viral charts have emerged to show how much more progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders is than Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, the difference isn’t as stark as they say.
After a New York Timesanalysis found Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton voted in synch 93 percent of the time during their two overlapping Senate years, Sanders’ supporters have been pushing back on the notion that the two leading Democratic presidential candidates are largely the same.
Several readers asked us to look at graphics circulating on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit that attempt to differentiate Sanders and Clinton by highlighting differences in their voting records.
We’ve already looked at claims about the two candidates’ donors, which is mentioned in the lower half of this chart in particular. But we wondered if the claims about their voting records and policy positions were correct.
We found that many of the chart’s points are correct, though some either fail to capture Clinton’s flip-flops over the years or over-simplified her stance on issues where her public comments are really thin.
