Ezra Klein: Why did Obama promise people could keep their health insurance? Blame Bill Clinton.

[flpoljunkie]

Emphasis mine

Why did Obama promise people could keep their health insurance? Blame Bill Clinton.

By Ezra Klein, Published: November 12 at 2:32 pm

The irony of Bill Clinton coming out to advise that Obamacare be changed — somehow — to let everyone keep their current plans is that he's the reason Obama made the disastrous promise in the first place.

Veterans of the effort to pass Clinton's health-care plan believed that their core mistake was producing a plan that upended the insurance arrangements of almost every American.

In the aftermath of Clinton's failure, health-care reformers swung far to the other side. Rather than building a plan in which almost everyone lost their insurance, they began trying to build plans in which almost no one lost their insurance — and selling them under the promise that literally no one would.

That promise, as the Obama administration is now learning, went too far. Saying "everyone who likes their health insurance can keep it" is very different from saying "95 percent of people who like their health insurance can keep it."

But it's a bit rich for Clinton to argue for a plan that leaves everyone's insurance unchanged. When he managed this policy process, he believed the optimum policy upended almost everything. He knows that it's functionally impossible to reform the health-care market if you upend nothing. This is the kind of argument that, in another context, Clinton would be delighting in explaining, carefully and persuasively, why it's so very wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/12/why-did-obama-promise-people-could-keep-their-health-insurance-blame-bill-clinton/

[CTyankee]

1. Excellent analysis. Bill is a spoiler. Shame on him.

[Beacool]

2. So, what happened 20 years ago and the promises made now by this administration are Bill's fault?

How predictable............