The Clinton administration’s plan for universal health care never was about “the greater social good” or “doing the people’s business.”
It was about elimination of the private insurance sector—from the corporate boardroom to the insurance broker in the field. All would be eliminated in favor of one insurance agent . . . the government. The ill-fated Clinton proposal was a plan for compulsory enrollment, compulsory health insurance taxes paid by employers, increased public taxation, and means-tested premiums.
It was about the elimination of private medical care—from the doctor’s office to the drug store. Every health care move you made—from your doctor’s appointment to your mastectomy to your Viagra purchase—would be under government control and recorded in a government databank.
The Real Story Emerges
There are millions of records describing the secret workings of Hillary Clinton and her health care task force, thanks to Judge Lamberth’s order making them public back in March 1993. In a lawsuit filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Lamberth found Mrs. Clinton and the top-tier of 12 select advisors had blatantly violated “open meeting laws.”
From many internal memos, it appears both Clintons, and their confidants Ira Magaziner, Vincent Navarro, and James Carvil, knew early on that Congress would never pass the enabling legislation needed to nationalize the health care system in one traumatic step.
While the plan of choice was to create a single-payer health care system, they expected all along that it would be the fall-back plans that would make their way through a Republican Congress and become the law of the land.
Fallback 1: Kids in Coops
In August 1992, task-force memos show Mrs. Clinton’s advisors took great interest in “KiddieCare,” a part of the Great Society LBJ never had a chance to propel through Congress in 1968. Task-force members requested reams of documents from the LBJ library in Austin. Eventually, those documents became part of the task-force record and formed the foundation for a new plan to bring all uninsured children and uninsured mothers under a national health insurance system administered by the Medicaid bureaucracy.
There is further evidence in a key follow-up memo seven months later, dated March 24, 1993, from White House advisor Atoll Gwande to task-force member and Minnesota health commissioner Lois Quam. The memo clearly states the Clinton health care plan would focus on children, using them to bring about socialized medicine in what was first described as “Kids in Cooperatives.”
Single-Payer by Default
We now recognize the agenda as “KidCare” or SCHIP (States Children’s Health Insurance Plan). SCHIP has rapidly exceeded its publicized intent of providing Medicaid health insurance to uninsured children. In many states, SCHIP coverage now extends from birth to age 21, employing school-based health care clinics called for in “Healthy Goals 2000.”
Medicaid waivers have been granted to states allowing expansion of SCHIP plans to uninsured mothers and uninsured parents of the children eligible for KidCare. In some states, the family income means-test has been increased to three times the federal poverty level ($14,630). In other words, taxpayers are, in some states, paying to insure three-person households with annual incomes as high as $43,890. Most Americans think Medicaid is a health insurance program for the poor. In fact, it’s being made into a single-payer health care system by default through creative interpretation, manipulation of original intentions, and the stealth use of taxpayer funds.
While reforms may have cut welfare rolls dramatically, the health care welfare rolls have grown dramatically over the past several years.
Fallback 2: HIPAA
There is a great deal of evidence to support the conclusion that enabling legislation for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is built on the Health Security Act first proposed by the Clint task force. All they needed was someone to lay the proposal in front of Congress.
The Clinton administration called on national health care stalwart Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), who in turn called on a naive and retiring Kansas Republican, Senator Nancy Kassebaum.
The Kassebaum-Kennedy bill became HIPAA legislation, and it was everything Kennedy and the Clintons needed to continue their slow, methodical progression toward a single-payer health care plan. It became considerably more than what Kassebaum ever imagined or wanted. Even Bob Dole admitted as much.
HIPAA contains the keys for a national single-payer plan: It takes authority over regulatory functions previously in the domain of states; nationalizes such insurance mandates as guaranteed issue and guaranteed renewal; mandates a national medical database; and incorporates language enabling and authorizing creation of a national citizens identification system.
Reform Deja Vu
During the 2002 state legislative sessions, health care reformers across the country should be prepared to defend free markets and individual liberty. Socialized health care advocates in Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, and Washington are hoping to convince voters and legislators that Mrs. Clinton should get a second chance at socializing American health care—even if it means doing it one state at a time.
This is not about doing the “greater social good,” or any other warm and fuzzy sound bite. This is about socialized medicine, plain and simple . . . and dangerous.
For more information . . .
on the Clinton health care task-force files, see http://aapsonline.org/judicial/aapsvsclinton.htm and the University of Maryland at http://www.umd.edu—search National Archives No. 2.
