Reply #15: The woman is wrong, but wasn't totally wrong [View All]

[karynnj]

She is saying that she didn't hear Hillary make the case for health care. The fact is that HRC clearly worked hard on health care, but much of it was behind closed doors. You could argue that a key mistake was not including Congress more in the process - rather than shutting them out as well. However, even had she done that there would still have been little seen by the public at large. (How many people would have watched hearings of Kennedy's HELP committee in 1993.

As it was HRC DID go to Congress and introduce the plan she had and it was televised and very very widely reported on. There never was a bill that came out of it and HRC did NOT go to the American people with a series of rallies, speeches etc. trying to put pressure on Congress to do something they didn't want to do. The woman is clearly speaking of HRC using her popularity, position as First Lady and visibility to actively and conspicuously lobby for health care. I think it was BILL's decision not to actually introduce a bill and fight for it. (from reading both their autobiographies) Rather than responding in anger to the woman - he could have spoke of HIS decision that it could not be done and that HRC could NOT have unilaterally continued to fight for it.

The later healthcare accomplishments came out of the Senate and - at least on S-CHIP she joined a group of former First Ladies who lent their names to efforts in support of it and HRC lobbied her husband to keep it in the bill. If you think that accomplishment was important to Bill - you might be surprised by the index in his book. (Not to mention in the bizzare 2 pages discussing the Weld/Kerry race - he doesn't mention as a reason to support Kerry, who was already the Democratic nominee months before the editting ended, - that Kerry and Kennedy had written the precursor bill to S-CHIP based on a program in MA passed over Weld's veto.