Obamacare — the crowning achievement on Barack Obama’s presidency — has a new critic: former President Bill Clinton.
Campaigning for his wife in Michigan, Clinton unloaded on the impact Obama’s signature legislation has had on insurance and the insured.
“You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden, 25 million more people have health care, and then the people are out there busting it for 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.
“And it’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.
But he wasn’t done.
He also told the Michigan audience, “If you were on the other side of this, if you were the insurer, and you say, ‘gosh, I’ve only got 2,000 people in this little pool.’
“Eighty percent of the insurance costs every year come from 20% of the people,” Clinton said.
“If I get unlucky in the pool,” Clinton said, continuing to talk like an insurance company, “I’ll lose money.”
“So they over charge you just to make sure. In the good years, they make a profit out of the people least able to pay it. It doesn’t make any sense,” Clinton said.
“The insurance model doesn’t work here. It’s not like life insurance, it’s not like casualty, it’s not like predictive flood.
“It does not work,” Clinton declared.
The former president acknowledged Obamacare is hurting small businesses.
“The current system works fine if you’re eligible for medicaid, if you’re a lower income working person, if you’re already on medicare, or if you get enough subsidies on a modest income that you can afford your health care,” Clinton said.
“But the people getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies,” he said.
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