Watch: 2009 Video Shows Bill Clinton Defending Bernie's Single-Payer Healthcare Plan
In this clip, former President Bill Clinton stands up for the Bernie Sanders-style vision of single-payer healthcare that our nation desperately needs. Host Sanjay Gupta proposed the same debate that our nation is having today- is it “politically unpalatable, or is it a bad idea?”
Clinton enthusiastically goes to bat for the idea: “Well, I think it’s more politically unpalatable than it is a bad idea. Because single-payer is not socialized medicine. Canada has a single-payer system, and a private health care system. Our single-payer systems are Medicare and Medicaid and Medicare is quite popular. The good thing about single-payer is the administrative costs are quite low. We probably waste $200 billion a year between the insurance administrative costs, the doctors’ and other health care providers’ administrative costs, and employers’ administrative costs in health care that we would not waste if we had any other country’s system.”
He goes on to assess the more effective healthcare systems in other countries – mixed systems in Japan and Germany, fully nationalized in the United Kingdom. Our healthcare system, even with Obamacare, is bloated and far too complicated. The health insurance lobby has too much money at stake to let this go – but as Clinton remarks, it’s a system that “treats sick people but doesn’t work to keep them well.”
Watch it here:
