Hillary’s Attack on Patients’ Choice

In 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton told her audience at a fundraiser in San Francisco: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Her recently announced healthcare plan, or HillaryCare II, does take things away from middle-class America but radically fails to provide any public good. Stripping patients’ choice and access in exchange for government-run healthcare is not the prescription America needs.

Coverage is only one component of our healthcare system. Another, often overlooked, aspect is access. Simply providing coverage to people does not ensure access to needed healthcare. Poor-paying, slow reimbursement systems force patients onto waiting lists, delaying care in habitually underserved communities. Coverage alone will not benefit anyone without providing access to quality care.

Hillary Clinton or Karl Marx?
September 24, 2007
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
[]RUSH: I want to read you some quotes, ladies and gentlemen, and I want to ask you if you know who said these things. I have six of them.

Number one: “We are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Number two: “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, for the few, and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.”

Number three: “We can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

Number four: “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own turf in order to create this common ground.”

Number five: “I certainly think the free market has failed.”

Number six: “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in the entire economy, that they are being watched.”

Number seven: “What I want to do is take those profits and apply them to alternative energy.”

None of those seven things were said by Karl Marx or Frederick Engels. These were all stated by Hillary Clinton: June 29th of ‘04, May 29th of ‘07, June 4th of ‘07, June 4th of 2007, June 4th of ‘07, and September 2nd of ‘05.

“Shared responsibility” is a common theme of Mrs. Clinton. So let’s go to the audio sound bites. On Slay the Nation yesterday, Bob Schieffer said, “Last week you rolled out your new health care plan, something Republicans immediately said is going to lead to socialized medicine. It would require, among other things —”

SCHIEFFER: Other things that everyone —

HILLARY: (Cackling) I’m sorry, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: — would have to — would have to buy health insurance. You were proposing to pay for it —

HILLARY: Right.

SCHIEFFER: — by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts. How do you force people to buy health insurance, Senator?

HILLARY: Well, let me describe briefly what it is I’m trying to do, Bob, because this is not government-run health care. We don’t create any new bureaucracy, but we do have shared responsibility.

RUSH: There it is: “shared responsibility.”

Now for the first year or two she may not create any new bureaucracy, and for the first year or two she may not eliminate the private insurance business in order to do this, but that’s just to set up the takeover down the road once the costs spiral out of control with the other mandates she’s going to put on it. The whole objective of Mrs. Clinton’s plan is to make it look like she’s really not changing anything other than covering everybody with insurance, but she wants the program, wants the whole system to break down in such a fashion. This is a typical liberal trick, by the way: Stack the deck so the whole thing fails leaving only one option, the government to go in to save the day, and that’s when she will move in with the full-fledged part of her plan that she is not announcing. Congress will “work out the details.” Her proposal is just ten pages now. So she can’t promise anything here because she’s going to let Congress work out the details.

Look, folks, politics is a product. Mrs. Clinton tried it with what was in her heart and mind 14 years ago. It didn’t work. So now time to repackage it. Same product, just packaged in a different way to make it more salable; it’s the same product and isn’t going to change.

On Stephanopoulos, the question: “Would illegal immigrants be covered under your plan?”

HILLARY: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you that time, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Would illegal immigrants be covered under your plan?

HILLARY: Illegal immigrants —

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes.

HILLARY: — would not be covered, no. They would not be covered.

RUSH: All right, now, we have a major conflict here, because if she doesn’t cover illegal immigrants, then we’re still going to end up with at least 20 million uninsured, but she also said last week that you’re going to have to have insurance when you go into the job interview. Remember that?

So how in the world are the illegals going to ever get a job if they don’t have health insurance? You gotta have health insurance to get a job just like you gotta have auto insurance to get a car.

Remember, this is not something the feds can mandate, by the way. The states can, but the federal government cannot mandate to do this.

How can everybody be insured if everybody isn’t going to be insured? Illegal immigrants aren’t going to be insured. So then how is everybody going to be insured?

This is the smartest woman in the world. They’re invisible. Be very afraid, ladies and gentlemen, is all I’m telling you. Be very afraid.

Now, this next one is a huge, huge, maybe one of the biggest “See, I Told You So’s” in my star-studded and stellar career. Stephanopoulos said, “Can you pledge that all US troops will be home over the course of your first term as president?”

HILLARY: You know, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals and make pledges because I don’t know what I’m going to inherit, George, I don’t know and neither do any of us know what will be the situation in the region, how much more aggressive will Iran have become, what will be happening in the Middle East, how much more of an influence will the chaos in Iraq have in terms of what’s going on in the greater region, will we have pushed Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of their strongholds with our new partnership with some of the tribal sheiks, or will they have regrouped and retrenched?

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t really quite know what to say here. She has just outlined the position of George W. Bush and General Petraeus, to whom she said to listen to would require willing suspension of disbelief.

I also have been telling you for months that the dirty little secret is, if Hillary Clinton is elected, she’s not pulling those troops out of there because she’s not going to saddle herself with a United States defeat. You compare what you heard her say here to what she has been saying... I mean, every hour, it seems her position on the war changes and she flip-flops. We gotta get those troops out of there now, she’s saying today. We gotta get ‘em out of there! We have to bring ‘em home. We have to start that process, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What about when you’re president?

Oh, no, no, no! I don’t want to be saddled with that.

She’s also going to say: “I don’t know what the Bush administration kept from us. I got to the White House. I was president. I was elected, and I saw the file. I said, ‘My God, we can’t get out of there! Look at what all is happening! Oh, this is horrible what we face. It would be irresponsible to get out.’” There’s no way she’s pulling the troops out. She’s talking about how to win in this answer, but only in the context if she’s president. Before then, she’s free to run around and try to promote defeat all she wants, and nobody calls her on it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

I want to go back to this Hillary sound bite, folks. I’ll tell you, all of you leftists out there, those of you in the anti-war movement who think the Democrats are your boys on this and you’re going to do this and that and you’re going to get ‘em out of there and troops are coming out, and Mrs. Clinton is going to make sure they come out, I want you to listen to this, two things about it.

A, she said in this answer everything I predicted that she would say, but she’s beating me to the punch in terms of I didn’t think she would say this until she’s president.

I told you that there’s no way Hillary is going to take troops out of Iraq if she’s elected. There’s no way she’s going to saddle herself and the party with defeat of the US military and the United States of America. No way it’s going to happen. Dirty little secret. Democrats don’t know it, the anti-war crowd, the kook blogosphere on the left, doesn’t know it.

What else did I say?

I said she would say, “Well, we don’t know what the Bush administration held from us. I don’t know what I’m going to inherit. I had no idea what the situation was going to be.” Sort of like Clinton’s tax cuts. He led everybody to believe he was going to cut taxes, and after a month, “I worked harder than I ever have in my life. I just can’t find a way to do it. The Bush administration, there’s some things that I learned when I got in here I didn’t know were going on in the economy, we just can’t do it.”

Same technique will be employed here, and she admits it.

So here’s the question again. Remember, now, this is what the Democrat Party thinks the ‘06 elections were about, in which she was reelected. “Can you pledge that all US troops will be home over the course of your first term as president?”

HILLARY: You know, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals and make pledges because I don’t know what I’m going to inherit, George. I don’t —

RUSH: Stop the tape. There it is.

She’s already making pledges, though. She’s already told Petraeus she doesn’t believe what he’s saying about the situation in Iraq. Keep that in mind.

As you hear the rest of this bite, she doesn’t believe what Petraeus has said, she doesn’t believe what Bush is saying, there’s no reason to be there. We ought to bring the troops home. We need to start now bringing the troops home.

Now, listen to the rest of this.

HILLARY: — know and neither do any of us know what will be the situation in the region, how much more aggressive will Iran have become —

RUSH: Stop the tape. What does that matter? It doesn’t matter now, Mrs. Clinton, it doesn’t matter to Chuck Schumer, doesn’t matter to Dick Durbin, doesn’t matter to you now, or Harry Reid, why will it matter when you’re president what Iran is doing? Here’s the next sentence.

HILLARY: — what will be happening in the Middle East, how much more —

RUSH: Stop the tape. What does that matter? Doesn’t matter now. What do you mean, keeping troops there when you’re president will depend on what’s happening in the Middle East? Why does that not matter now, Mrs. Clinton?

HILLARY: — more of an influence will the chaos in Iraq have in terms of what’s going on in the greater region.

RUSH: Why does that matter now? Why does that not matter now? Why is it only going to matter when you’re president? The chaos in the region, chaos in Iraq, that apparently is of no concern now to you or your party. Why will it be a concern when you are president?

HILLARY: — we have pushed Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of their strongholds with our new partnership with some of the tribal sheiks, or will they have regrouped and retrenched?

RUSH: She’s talking about the surge here, and they’re saying the surge failed. Why does it matter whether our partnership — what do you mean, Al-Qaeda in Iraq?

I thought Al-Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq, Mrs. Clinton.

I thought this whole thing was bogus, Bush lied.

My, my, my, how things change when you are asked questions of what you’re going to do as president.

And every bit of this, never forget, my friends, I, El Rushbo, the all knowing, all seeing Maha Rushie, predicted this very answer. She just beat me to it by a year-and-a-half.

END TRANSCRIPT

Read the Background Material...
Bloomberg: Hillary and Health Care Prove a Toxic Mix Again: Kevin Hassett
ABC: Hillary’s Health Care Plan: Universal?
TH: Hillary’s Health Care Nightmare
WS: The GOP’s Health Care Consensus
CNN: Clinton: I Won’t Fund Iraq War Without Withdrawal Plan
WP: Hitting All the Sunday Talk Shows, Clinton Says a Lot but Reveals Little

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