Bill Clinton says Obama should keep promise on insurance, but knows that won't work, Washington Post writer says

Former president Bill Clinton's recent statement that President Obama should change the health-reform law to keep his promise that people who liked their health-insurance plans could keep them or ironic because "He's the reason Obama made the disastrous promise in the first place," Ezra Klein writes for The Washington Post.

"Veterans of the effort to pass Clinton's health-care plan believed that their core mistake was producing a plan that upended the insurance arrangements of almost every American," Klein reports. "In the aftermath of Clinton's failure, health-care reformers swung far to the other side. Rather than building a plan in which almost everyone lost their insurance, they began trying to build plans in which almost no one lost their insurance — and selling them under the promise that literally no one would."

But that promise "went too far," Klein writes, because "saying 'everyone who likes their health insurance can keep it' is very different from saying '95 percent of people who like their health insurance can keep it'." However, Clinton "knows that it's functionally impossible to reform the health-care market if you upend nothing." (Read more)