‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt’ ~ Abraham Lincoln
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Jonathan Cohn: Bill Clinton’s Obamacare Comments Are Wrong
in a new interview already getting attention and sure to get more, Clinton didn’t explain things very well. He made a statement that’s likely to create some misimpressions about the possibilities of health care reform, while giving the administration and its allies yet another political headache.
He said that some young people facing higher premiums under the new system should have the right to keep their old plans, even if it requires a change in the law. Clinton framed it carefully: He said specifically he had in mind only those young people whose incomes were higher than four times the poverty line, making them ineligible for subsidies. (That’s about $45,000 for a single adult.) But he also suggested it was a matter of principle, because those people had heard the vow that they could keep their plans: “I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”
Clinton’s statement makes it seem as if there is some simple way to let people keep their current plans—to avoid any disruption in the existing non-group market while still delivering the law’s benefits. As readers of this space know, no such magic solution exists.
Broadly speaking, the Affordable Care Act seeks to make two sets of changes to what’s called the “non-group” market. It establishes a minimum set of benefits, which means everything from covering “essential” services to eliminating annual or lifetime limits on payments. At the same time, the law prohibits insurers from discriminating among customers: They can’t charge higher prices, withhold benefits, or deny coverage altogether to people who represent medical risks. They have to take everybody, varying price only for age (within a three-to-one ratio) and for tobacco use.
More here
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The Obama Diary 
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Don
Maybe the problem is that we’re looking at the Hillary Clinton situation through a political lens and not a psychological lens. When you’re beloved by black folk as much as the Clintons were you can’t come away from thinking that you’re not one of them, or that you don’t understand the plight of black folk. The problem the Clintons encountered was that an actual black man arrived and challenged their standing in the black community. When Bill Clinton was attacked, many in the black community defended him.
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When his impeachment was taking place every black minister with a church ran down to the White House to lay hands on Bill Clinton and to pray for him. Damn near every black celebrity that ever met Bill Clinton said that Bill had a special connection with them. For lack of a better word, Bill Clinton had a stranglehold on the Black community. In the eighties in the black community you had a lot of social and judicial unrest, blacks had to find a way to channel that unrest, and they found it through starting businesses, they found it through the arts, and they found it through politics. And by the time the nineties arrived the black community was on the verge of realizing its power.
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Then Bill Clinton arrived, he invited us into the White House to break bread with him, in so many ways “he felt our pain.” To this day Bill and Hillary Clinton can walk into any neighborhood of color and be welcomed with open arms. In the black community the past works of the Clintons guaranteed our never wavering loyalty.
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And then it happened, on a cold day in Illinois an unassuming skinny black man with an unusual name said that he was running to be President of the United States of America. And as quickly as he announced he was also quickly dismissed, even by some in the black community. The black political structure was not ready for Barack Obama, we were ok if you ran for Mayor or Senator or Governor. But for the Presidency, hold on a minute young buck.
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The psychological chains are the hardest chains the black community has ever had to break; even to this day we struggle to break them to some extent. And this is where the Clintons come in; we in the black community we put the Clintons on such a pedestal that they’ve convinced themselves that they can do no wrong when it came to the black voter. What the Clintons failed to understood was that a vote for Barack was not necessarily a vote against them.
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Many people believed that black people voted for Barack because he was black, some of that is true. But those voters didn’t outnumber those voters that voted against Barack because he was black; those two groups cancelled each other out. So, now you have the Clintons being loved in the black community versus the black community voting for Barack Obama. And that is the problem that the Clintons couldn’t understand, to this day they still don’t understand it. And because they didn’t understand it they lashed out in ways that didn’t make sense in the black community. Bill Clinton telling Ted Kennedy that back in the day someone like Barack would be serving them coffee, questioning Barack’s citizenship. And undermining the President Obama at every opportunity are just some of the ways that they have lashed out.
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The Clintons would do well this time around to embrace President Obama and understand what he represents for the country, but more importantly what he represents for the black community.
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