Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager dodged questions Tuesday morning about former President Bill Clinton saying this week that the Affordable Care Act is a “crazy system” in which small businesses are getting killed.
“This is an issue that affects a lot of voters — look, the important thing is that 20 million Americans have health insurance today because of the Affordable Care Act,” Robby Mook said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.”
“It has made a tremendous difference in a lot of people’s lives, but we need to do more to lower premiums,” he added, “and in particular the price of prescription drugs is rising way too fast. We’ve seen these companies, you know, abusing their patents to jack up costs for life-saving cancer drugs and the like.”
Mook said, “So Secretary Clinton and [Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.] have a plan to get those drug prices down to make sure families can afford them and finally do something about these premiums increases.”
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell kept after the question.
“But does Secretary Clinton agree with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, that Obamacare is a quote crazy system that hurts small businesses?” she asked.
Mook dodged the question again, and reiterated the campaign’s position that it wants to address premium costs.
“Well, what he was referring to was the healthcare system both as it used to be and then, sometimes, what happens in some of these markets, you know, where basically the marketplace skews the cost — this is exactly why we got to do something about premium increases, but I assume also [Bill Clinton] was including in that prescription drug prices,” Mook said.
The “CBS This Morning” team let it go at that, and they moved on to a discussion of the 2016 election polls.
Bill Clinton said this week that the Affordable Care Act is a good deal compared to what the U.S. used to have in place.
However, he added it’s not a perfect system, especially if you’re a small business owner.
“The people who are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies. Why? Because they’re not organized and they don’t have any bargaining power with insurance companies and they’re getting whacked,” Clinton said at a campaign event in Flint, Mich.
Clinton added, “So you got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have healthcare, and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.”
The simplest solution, Clinton said, would be to figure out an affordable rate and let people use that, and to let people who are “above the line” have access to “affordable entry into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s characterizations of the Affordable Care Act tend to be far rosier than her husband’s (though she hasn’t mentioned the issue much at all since Labor Day).
“[T]he fact is, we have the Affordable Care Act. That is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party and of our country,” she said in January during a Democratic primary presidential debate.
