Hillary Clinton defends daughter’s attacks on Bernie Sanders over health care

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday defended her daughter’s contention a day earlier that Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont wants to “dismantle” Obamacare and private health insurance, saying the Vermont senator needs to better explain how to pay for his national, single-payer health care proposal.

“First off, I adore my daughter, and I know what she was saying, because if you look at Senator Sanders’ proposals going back nine times in the Congress, that’s exactly what he’s proposed: to take everything we currently know as health care — Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP program, private insurance, now the Affordable Care Act — and roll it together,” Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Stumping for her mother in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Chelsea Clinton had said that Mr. Sanders wants to “dismantle” Obamacare, the children’s health insurance program (CHIP), Medicare, and private insurance.

“I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance,” Ms. Clinton said, according to NBC News.

Mrs. Clinton, the presidential candidate, said Wednesday she wanted “specifics.”

“We’re now in the area where we have to go from generalization to specifics,” she said. “I have said what I will do to improve the Affordable Care Act.”

“What Senator Sanders has said, and it’s his perfect right to say it, is he wants a national health insurance, single-payer system,” she said. “OK, so now tell the American people how much that’s going to cost them.”

The Sanders campaign said the Clinton campaign is “wrong,” and that the plan will be implemented in every state regardless of who is governor.

“It is time for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized world and provide health care as a right to every man, woman and child,” said Sanders campaign spokeswoman Arianna Jones. “A Medicare-for-all plan will save the average middle-class family $5,000 a year.”