So the Republicans are jumping in unison on Bill Clinton’s statement that Obama should “fix” Obamacare to allow people to keep the garbage insurance plans if they want to. To these people with such short attention span, Bill Clinton is the only person of importance in the Democratic party to make such a request.
But if they were listening to the President last week in an interview with Chuck Todd of MSNBC, these same dim-wits would have heard the President himself say that he and his team are working on ways to fix this problem in the healthcare law. White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about this in a recent press conference, and had to remind everyone that what Clinton said is actually a moot point, because it is already being looked into.
JULIE PACE, ASSOCIATED PRESS: I wanted to get your reaction to a comment that President Clinton made in an interview that was posted today. He was talking about health care, he said, President Obama should honor his commitment to people who have lost their health care or losing their health care under the president’s law, even if it means changing that law. Does the president agree with the comment?
JAY CARNEY: I think as you saw the president say in an interview with NBC last week, the answer’s yes. The president has asked his team with looking at a range of options — as he said — to make sure that nobody is put in a position where their plans have been canceled and they can’t afford a better plan even though they’d like to have a better plan.
You heard the president address this very issue in his interview last week. And I think it’s important to note that President Clinton, in that interview, also said, and I quote, ‘the big lesson is that we are better off with this law than without it.’ And he said, quote, ‘the enrollment period did not come off well because the national website wasn’t ready. But this happened once before. It happened when President Bush put in the Medicare drug program for seniors, which was not as complicated but had exactly the same problem with the rollout. It was a disaster. There were people that lost their prescriptions for their existing medicine and they fixed it.’
So, the president, as you know, has pledged to ask his team, tasked his team to look at potential actions that could be taken to address this problem, because his focus is on making sure that people get quality and affordable health insurance.
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But it’s a waste of time. These Republicans would only hear what they want to hear, and Clinton’s statement plays right into their gameplan – creating enough noise about Obamacare, in hopes that Americans would not buy into the law, thus making it a failure.