Clinton plans Tuesday meetings with all Hill Democrats

[karynnj]

76. In the first, she is using the demand for single payer as a threat - saying if you don't have

something like her plan, by 2000 (note that is still in the Clinton years - Bush was sworn in in 2001) there would be so much demand for single payer, that would happen.

As to 2008. I didn't see the link, but found the article as you had the reporter, the paper and date (thanks)

However, here is what she says of single payer:

MRS. CLINTON: You know, I have thought about this, as you might guess, for 15 years and I never seriously considered a single payer system. Obviously, I listened to arguments about its advantages and disadvantages, and many people who I have a great deal of respect for certainly think that it is the only way to go. But I said, as you quoted me, that we had to do what would appeal to and actually coincide with what the body politic will and political coalition building was. So I think if you look at most public opinion surveys, even from groups of people who you would think would be pretty positive towards single payer, Americans have a very skeptical attitude. They don’t really know that Medicare is a single payer system. They don’t really think about that. They think about these foreign countries that they hear all these stories about, whether they’re true or not, which they’re often not. And so talking about single payer really is a conversation ender for most Americans, because then they become very nervous about socialized medicine and all the rest of this. So I never really seriously considered it.

Here's the link to the full article - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27text-health.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 - which is good. In fact, Obama, Clinton and Edwards were ALL speaking of nearly the same proposal. In fact, ANY one of them would have likely ended with the same system -- because Congress actually designed what could pass. In fact, the plans they proposed looked a lot like Dean's and especially Kerry's (Kerry's reinsurance of catastrophic costs is important to making preexisting illnesses coverable in a reasonable way.)

I have no problem with what Clinton said - her plan, Obama's plan etc were what could pass at a time of an unusual majority in Congress.