Bill Clinton decries Obamacare as a failure

OPINION:

Hillary Clinton’s surrogates in the big media continue to be obsessed with Donald Trump’s wide-ranging discussions from what they think his message ought to be. They’re missing a good sidebar. Bubba is back at what he does best, being Bubba.

The Clinton campaign had managed to keep the former president and his verbal indiscretions off the front pages by keeping him at home, or at least out of the way. But then the public-opinion polls tightened again. In fact, Rasmussen Reports says the race is once more in a dead heat. So when Hillary had to take a few days off to nurse herself back to health, Bubba escaped to his favorite hiding place, the stump.

He wasted no time in getting back to his accustomed place in the newspapers and on the evening television news. He went after Obamacare, which President Obama regards as his “signature accomplishment,” and the “accomplishment” that will be his legacy, like it or not. Merely by saying out loud what everyone, even the most partisan Democrats, is beginning to conclude, Bubba described the health scheme as “the craziest thing in the world.” Middle-class working Americans, he said, “wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” Such spirited rhetoric recalls Bubba’s famous put-down of Mr. Obama’s promise of hope and change, set out in 2008, as “a fairy tale.” He took a lot of heat for his candor, but he’s turning out to be correct.

Bubba’s solution to Mr. Obama’s craziness, however, is more Clinton craziness. He told the Michigan audience that if the nation had adopted the plan his wife championed in 1993, a plan more radical than Obamacare, all would be well now and everyone would be satisfied. Health plans like Hillary’s, circa 1993, reprised in 2008 and now presented anew, have been the dream of liberal politicians for decades. They argue that health care in America is second rate, too expensive, and gives patients and their doctors too much control over decisions that should be made by government bureaucrats.

Hillary’s scheme now is to simply put Americans with their soaring premiums into the Medicaid system, which was designed to help the poor. Neither Bubba nor the missus concede that the blame for Obamacare, visible to everyone else, rightly lies with those who designed the craziness and pushed it through Congress without a single Republican vote. The Republicans who wouldn’t vote for it warned that it wouldn’t work. The price of foolishness is just now coming clear to everyone.

The Legatum Institute, a British think tank of good reputation that examines economic and political life in various countries and rates their efficiencies, issued its ratings of health care this week and found that the American health care system, which President Obama and Hillary Clinton seem determined to destroy, is the best in the world. Hillary wants to replace the best with a health-care system like those in Canada or Britain. The Legatum Institute ranks the Canadian system the 11th best, and British at 20th best. No. 11 and No. 20 might be pretty good in most socialist backwaters, but 11th best and 20th best would not satisfy many Americans. Such a trade would be of a piece with every other promise Hillary and her mentor have made, full of sound, fury, and hot air. Bubba got this one right, Obamacare is in fact “the craziest thing in the world.”