CodeBlueBlog: Hillary Has No Clothes

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Hillary Has No Clothes

In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton had a front page story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 18, 2004, titled "Now Can We Talk About Health Care?"

There's a lot to say about the article. Almost too much. It's hard to know where to begin. With the title? As if she were right all along and ahead of her time in 1994 and it's just taken us laggards 10 years to catch up to her? Should I address the threadbare arguments and long disproved statistics? The Magaziner/Clinton arrogance in imagining they could fabricate a secret comprehensive top-down reform that would completely change the U.S. health care system which represents 14% of the economy?

While chewing over where to begin, I had the sudden sensation that something was stuck between my teeth. A persistent sinewy remnant refused maceration until suddenly I spit it out. AHA! I recognize this! The repetitive arguments. The communalistic rhetoric. The sloppy lacing together of disparate strains of logic. The medical non sequiturs. I know where this comes from!

And then I had it. That old feeling of insight and revelation. I had a Clinton moment only now with Hillary: SHE'S JIVING US! Covering up for her intellectual inadequacies with tautology and rhetoric and busted nuance. And why?

Because Hillary is underpowered. Low voltage. She's a lead battery in a Nickel Cadmium world. Hillary doesn't quite understand the health care system and has no real life experience in the field to compensate. She's an empty policy vessel rattling in the vacant room of her arrogance. But more importantly:

Hillary is not a capable enough intellect for this anointed task.

Rereading Hillary's Times cover story, I realized the truth of this insight. Her intelligence, blown out of proportion by an adoring press, has never been questioned; but, if you look closely, her logic and ideas and conclusions come together more like a college Sociology project than an executive policy proposal.

Just try to harvest some policy meat off this bone she throws us:

Twenty-first-century problems, like genetic mapping, an aging population and globalization, are combining with old problems like skyrocketing costs and skyrocketing numbers of uninsured, to overwhelm the 20th-century system we have inherited.

And here is a lesson in alliteration producing conclusions, for all you aspiring science writers:

As a whole, our ailing health care system is plagued with underuse, overuse and misuse. In a fundamental way, we pay far more for less than citizens in other advanced economies get.

Hillary also has ideas about the etiology and pathophysiology of diseases -- which she is not afraid to blurt out without preface or footnote; then, satisfied with her comprehensive grasp of the processes she goes on to offer a solution and a plan. All in one sentence!

If asthma and other pulmonary disorders are the main drivers of increased health spending, that argues strongly that we should rethink how social and environmental factors impact our collective health.

Oh, and in case we forgot, Hillary has a recurring theme, to be applied like a chiropractic adjustment to the manifold ills she intends to master and reform:

It will, as I have been known to say, take the whole village to finance an affordable and accountable health system.

Oh yeah, right. I almost forgot. It takes a village. HOW COULD WE HAVE BEEN SO STUPID?

No more. There is a LOT more of this, but, it's just too easy. Especially now that I know the answer is a riddle wrapped in an enigma: Hillary is the little kid in the back of the class with a finger up her nose.

Don't take my word for it though. There are other better-known, more influential people who are in on this dirty little secret. Like J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at Berkeley and a veteran of the Clinton administration. Delong was on Hillary’s health care reform taskforce in 1993-94. Here's what he had to say to the National Review:

“My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly."

Posted by Doctor CBB on May 18, 2004 at 01:20 PM | Permalink

Comments

Now if only the REST OF THE WORLD would get this...we'd be getting somewhere.

But the fact this woman is looked upon as the "savior of the Left" come 2008. Ugh.

Posted by: Christopher | May 19, 2004 at 12:34 AM

Hilary should keep her mouth shut when she doesn't know what she's talking about. CodeBlueBlog is on the mark.

Posted by: jellomold | May 19, 2004 at 05:06 PM

The fact that health care comprises 14% of our gdp just reflects the fact that far, far too much influence is weilded by the financial sectors, in this case specifically insurance companies.
As for many ailments being caused by environmental factors, that seems a pretty safe assumption to make. The cost/benefit ratio of addressing the factors would be an incredibly complex calculation, however.
Final point, your 'battery comparison anology' is particularly poor. Lead-acid batteries and ni-cad batteries are used in totally different applications - lead-acid batteries are used mostly in cars, where ni-cads would be totally inappropriate. If you meant to compare to copper-zinc, ni-cads have a lower specific voltage.
I've long thought that medical doctors have much in common with shamans. Just thought I'd throw that insight in.

Posted by: Jeff Lawson | May 21, 2004 at 04:30 AM

Tom, while you (as many others do) go overboard on the personal stuff against Hillary--and I suspect that has something to do with her gender--you actually fail to point out WHAT went wrong with her management of the 1994 fiasco.

The nation from 1991 to early 1993 was in a recession and there was a clear desire from the middle class for real reform. However, this was exactly correlated with the risk of losing a job and therefore losing health insurance. As the recovery commenced in late 1993, the risk of losing a job fell and so did support for comprehensive reform. This is clearly documented in the poll numbers from Harris and others.

The Clintons' mistake (and this was more his than hers) was in NOT following the pattern of successful Democrats (FDR, Johnson) and demanding that Congress act in the first 100 days of the adminstration. They took 6 months to announce the task force, study a problem that has been the same since universal insurance was irst proposed here (in 1917!) and another year to get legislation into Congress. By that time a) re-election was scaring Dems in Congress and b) it had given the opponents of reform (i.e. the whle health care system) 18 months to sow FUD a la Microsoft.

Had they proposed the Clinton 6 principles straight away and demanded a universal coverage system, we might have got one.

And saying that we can't do Federal top down reform is just crap. What do you think Medicare, Social Security, income tax, the draft, School integration and a ton of other govenment programs of the 20th century were?

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health care also health·care (hlthkâr) n. :efforts made to maintain or restore health especially by trained and licensed professionals -- usually hyphenated when used attributively

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