Emails show Hillary was lobbying for the ACA and its public option in 2009 -- as Sec of State.
So Hillary's proposal to offer a Medicare buy-in as a way to move toward a public option is not sudden or surprising . She has always been looking for ways to move progressive legislation forward, and has always had a particular interest in health care.
And she had advocated for the public option during her own Presidential campaign.
This email was written during a time when the Senate was trying to pass the ACA. Some Senators, like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus, were fighting the public option. Because the Rethugs were going to filibuster, the only way to get a bill through the Senate was to achieve 60 votes -- and that meant Lieberman and Baucus were critical votes. So we lost the battle to include the public option.
But Hillary was lobbying FOR it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/us/politics/hillary-clinton-lobbied-on-health-care-as-secretary-of-state-emails-show.html?_r=1
Ms. Tanden, who started working for Mrs. Clinton in the White House in the 1990s and is now president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, said the continuing interest in health care was hardly a surprise.
“The thing that I think the emails show you is she’s secretary of state and super-focused on health care,” Ms. Tanden said. “I worked for Hillary for a really long time, at the beginning of when I worked for her, in the middle of the time I worked for her and at the end of when I worked for her, in her mind, health care is a right.”
SNIP
“She was helpful when we needed votes, having served in the Senate and still having friends and colleagues there,” said one former Senate adviser, who asked not to be identified in discussing internal deliberations. “She did have credibility. She was considered an expert.”
That expertise is clear in some of the email messages, in which, for example, Mrs. Clinton questioned a decision by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, a main drafter of the legislation, to use nonprofit health insurance cooperatives to compete with profit-making insurers, rather than a government-run health plan, known as the public option.
“But the ‘system’ let the Blues go public,” she wrote in a message to Ms. Tanden, referring to the health insurance giant Blue Cross/Blue Shield, after learning of the Baucus plan. “What’s to prevent the co-ops from incorporating down the road? The return of nonprofits would have to require no changes.”
SNIP
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Clinton supported the public option in her 2008 presidential campaign, and during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act a year later, Congress debated allowing a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. However, the public option was eliminated from the legislation because of objections from moderate Senate Democrats who opposed a greater government role in providing health care.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/hillary-clinton-health-care-bernie-sanders-219643#ixzz48K1U3cf3
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