Bill Clinton: ‘I Was Wrong’ That Health Care Law Would Become Popular Quickly Appearing on Meet The Press, former President Bill Clinton said he was wrong to have predicted that the health care reform law would be immediately popular after being signed into law: “Well, I was wrong about that for two reasons. First of all, the benefits of the bill are spread out over three or four years. It takes a long time to implement it. And secondly, there was–there’s been an enormous and highly effective attack on it. But I think it’s important. Let’s–forget about the politics. Let’s talk about the facts here. The real reason that the interest groups want to repeal, not fix health care, is that they like the way it’s going now. They’re dumping people every year and making the government pick them up. We are spending 17.2 percent of our income on health care. None of our wealthy competitors spend more than 10 1/2. Yet our infant mortality rate is higher than theirs, our overall mortal–age expectancy is lower than theirs. We don’t have a better health system than they do. What’s happened? That’s a trillion dollars we spot our competitors every year for a health system that doesn’t work as well. The people that are getting a trillion dollars have a lot of money to spread all this information–misinformation.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=120982