Hillary Clinton offered a defense of Obamacare – but struck a note of concern for small business owners who’ve complained about mandates required by the law – in a twin set of speeches in Florida on Wednesday.
“I think we are on the right track in many respects but I would be the first to say if things aren’t working then we need people of good faith to come together and make evidence-based changes,” Clinton said at the first event, the Healthcare Information Manangement Systems Society conference in Miami, according to CNN.
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The event was closed to press, but people could buy tickets and attend.
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Clinton highlighted the problems voiced by people owning a “small business of 50 or more” as well as those “moving people from full-time work to part-time work to try to avoid contributing to their health care,” CNN reported.
Those are the very voters who Democrats are concerned about appealing to in the midterm elections, and to whom the most targeted messaging on the Affordable Care Act is taking place.
“Part of the challenge is to clear away all the smoke and try to figure out what is working and what isn’t,” Clinton said. “What do we need to do to try to fix this? Because it would be a great tragedy, in my opinion, to take away what has now been provided.”
“This is going to be challenging and I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bath,” she added, according to CNN, saying the debate has been rife with “misinformation.”
She struck a far folksier tone on Wednesday evening in talking about health care to a group of students at the University of Miami, where she engaged in a question-and-answer session with former Clinton-era Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. Hillary Clinton and Shalala, the university’s president, worked together on health care reform in the early 1990s, a fact Shalala referened by mentioning the “bruises” the two still have from that battle.
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She asked Clinton to explain to the students why they needed health care, and in a personal style reminiscent of her husband’s, she described the vastly better system the “so-called millennial generation” is entering into.
“On a very personal self-interested basis, you should have health insurance to protect yourself and your families from unpredictable costs that none of us know will be striking whenever,” she said. “You can’t sit here today and tell me for sure you won’t have a car accident, you won’t have a slip or a fall, you won’t have some kind of disease that you never thought you’d ever be stricken by.”
She added that the “vast majority of young people will get through their 20s” without such a fate. But “a significant minority percentage of you will not. You don’t know what category you’re in.”
Clinton said the costs to everyone goes down with an expanded pool of insured people, and reflected on her own life lessons.
(Also on POLITICO: Full health care policy coverage)
“You don’t have to take a job, as so many people in my generation did, just to have health insurance,” said Clinton, who has never been able to connect with crowds the way her husband does, but who talked in personal details to try to capture the students’ attention. “I know so many friends from literally high school, college, who stayed in jobs for decades because they had a spouse with a preexisting condition and they couldn’t afford to lose the job they had. You will be liberated from that.”
“Many of you are now covered because under it, up to the age of 26, your parents get to keep you on their policies. That wasn’t the case a few years ago,” Clinton added to applause.
Earlier, Clinton gave a 20-minute speech that laid out potential themes of a future stump talk, focusing on inclusion and participation in society – regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation – as a means for improving the country. That’s almost certain to be part of a message for a likely candidate who is many decades older than the younger voters who eluded her in her 2008 campaign.
Clinton did not attempt to connect to the students on false notes, and her repeated references to “your generation” and “young people” underscored the age gap. But it also contrasted with the scripted, often stilted version of Clinton who appeared at events in 2008.
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