Hillary Clinton, as you might expect after her work trying to reform the healthcare system in the 1990s, has her own ideas about what needs fixing in the Affordable Care Act that President Obama expended so much political capital to pass and considers a big part of his legacy.
And that might not be a bad thing, from the sound of it:
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she offered up a sheaf of new health care proposals, said she was “building on the Affordable Care Act.” But lurking in those proposals was a veiled criticism of President Obama’s signature domestic achievement: For many families, the Affordable Care Act has not made health care affordable.
Mr. Obama has spent five years minimizing cost issues still confronting many health care consumers. Mrs. Clinton is taking those on without apologies. She would go beyond the president’s 2010 law, capping a patient’s share of the bill for doctor visits and prescription drugs. She would repeal the law’s planned tax on high-cost employer-sponsored insurance — a tax the White House says is needed to constrain the growth of health spending.
And Mrs. Clinton, like Bill Clinton when he was president, appears to be more willing to confront insurers and drug makers over high prices. She said she would seek “authority to block or modify unreasonable health insurance rate increases” and stop “excessive profiteering” by drug companies....
Mrs. Clinton’s recent comments surprised and irked Obama administration officials. A White House spokeswoman said that, to her knowledge, the Clinton campaign had not consulted the administration.
What concerns the administration most is her idea to repeal the tax on high-cost health plans, the so-called Cadillac tax. The Obama administration says doing so will cause health care costs to rise and increase the deficit. Hillary rightly points out that organized labor negotiated for those good health plans and accepted them in lieu of higher wages, and shouldn't have those fairly negotiated benefits trashed.
Mrs. Clinton’s health policy proposals were calculated to appeal to Democratic voters and labor unions who might be tempted to support Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Many unions say the Cadillac tax, scheduled to take effect in 2018, will hurt their members, including schoolteachers and factory workers who gave up higher wages to secure generous health benefits....
Mrs. Clinton revealed her opposition to the Cadillac tax five days after a dozen senators introduced legislation to repeal it. Among the senators were Mr. Sanders...
Ah, the power of a primary.
Other changes she'd like to see made in Obamacare include tax credits up to $2,500 a year per person or $5,000 for a family for out-of-pocket health care costs over 5 percent of income, and "vigorous' enforcement of the ACA provision that requires health insurers to disclose the costs of specific medical services, something the Obama Administration has so far failed to do. She'd also require insurers to cover three “sick visits” a year without charging a deductible.
There are other provisions of her plan that would be improvements too, like letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, ending extra charges for out-of-network care, and limiting consumer out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs.
It's a regulatory approach, and a far cry from the single payer (Medicare-For-All) that Bernie Sanders would like to transition to, but it would be steps in the right direction, even though fairly small and bureaucratic ones.