The Clinton Campaign Has Resorted to Lies to Beat Sanders

[news]

[news]

We all knew the day would come when Hillary Clinton would finally have to stop pretending she wasn't worried about the Bernie Sanders campaign, and it has finally arrived.

Her daughter, Chelsea Clinton is now on the road doing stump speeches for her mom and using the opportunity to flat out lie about Bernie Sanders' healthcare plan.

"Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance," Clinton said in New Hampshire earlier this week. "I don't want to empower Republican governors to take away Medicaid, to take away health insurance for low-income and middle-income working Americans. And I think very much that's what Sen. Sanders' plan would do."

Yet, nothing about this statement is actually true and the Sanders campaign was quick to act calling her comments inaccurate, and the fact-checking site PolitiFact was not far behind.

Sanders has not released his health care proposal as a presidential candidate but this campaign has said that Sanders would model it after the 2013 bill he put forward.

PolitiFact says:

The bill, the American Health Security Act of 2013, specifically strips insurance benefits from the Affordable Care Act, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Medicare and Medicaid. The bill also bans the sale of private health insurance that duplicates benefits provided by the government program.

And she is also right that states would be the primary administrators of the system. The bill calls it a "state-based American Health Security Program." However, the assertion that it would empower Republican governors to take away individual's health insurance is misleading.

Sanders' plan requires states to set up the specifics of their health care system, though they must meet federal standards for various administrative details. For example, states must identify a single agency to manage the program. If a state does not set up a system, or if they refuse to meet the federal standards, the federal government will step in and run that state's program.

So this means Clinton's remarks that he would hand power over to governors is misleading, as it ignores the oversight and requirements. Currently, states can totally opt-out of many of these programs leaving too many uninsured residents, but Sanders' plan fixes that.

Clinton wants you to believe that millions would be left without insurance under Bernie's plan, but that is not the case.

"Her claim is analogous to saying that Medicare dismantled private insurance for the elderly," David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, told PolitiFact. "It replaced defective private coverage with something better."

Apparently the Clinton campaign is confused as what universal health care is and somehow imagine a program that covers every single American will somehow leave out millions.

Or, more realistically, they know this but understand the only way they stand a chance to knock down Sanders is to turn to flat out lies, stealing from the Republican Party playbook.


This article first appeared on Dan Arel's Danthropology blog.

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