Hillary Clinton: Fix Healthcare? Define “Fix”
 A couple years ago, the WaPo OpEd page carried an odd piece of bi-partisan puffery from Sens Bill Frist and Hillary Clinton– now both potential 2008 presidential candidates. As experts on healthcare – Dr. Frist’s daddy founded HCA, which made him filthy rich, while Clinton was appointed in 1993 by her hubby to put her estimable cattle futures investing skills to work revamping America’s broken, overpriced, and heartless healthcare system.
The following quote isn’t news to those of us who aren’t privileged enough to have private healthcare coverage paid for by the federal government (as members of Congress do):
“Today our care is often afflicted by systemic error and dramatic inefficiencies. According to a recent Rand Corp. study, even patients with the best available coverage receive recommended care, on average, only 55 percent of the time. Costs continue to escalate far in excess of inflation.”
What they’re saying is that American healthcare is sub-par even for those with “good” coverage and, inexplicably, it just keeps getting more unaffordable. So what have either of them done about it?
For her part, Clinton, through sheer Cheney-like secrecy and incompetence, managed to set the cause of national health care in this country back 100 years. The enormity she and her minions devised made Bush’s prescription drug plan read like a haiku.
For his part, Frist supported a slick “Harry and Louise” national ad campaign paid for by the healthcare industry to de-rail the Clinton plan.
So now that she’s the presumptive front-runner for the 2008 Dem presidential nomination, the bigfeet in American healthcare must be shaking in their scrubs, right? Hardly.
As it turns out, Sen Clinton is the second highest recipient of healthcare industry financial contributions nationwide, beat out only by Sen Rick Santorum.In the past year she’s taken $854,462 from the same Big Pharma, for-profit hospitals, private insurers, and doctors she accused in 1993 of “price gouging” and “unconscionable profiteering.” Their motives are clear – better to have Clinton inside the oxygen tent micturating out, than outside micturating in. But her motives? We can only guess.
And what about the 50 million Americans (10 million more than in 1993) who don’t have health coverage? Maybe they should sink a grand into pork bellies and make themselves a small fortune. What else is there?
~Jack McEnany
Also see: Hillary, Into the Breech, DNC
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