Papers offer peek into Hillary Clinton's failed healthcare initiative
WASHINGTON As Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to reshape the nation's healthcare system in her husband's first term as president, she got all the right advice from senior aides: Consult closely with members of Congress, build bridges with business leaders, communicate clearly to nervous voters, move swiftly.
The first lady and her husband ultimately failed in nearly all those efforts, nearly sinking Bill Clinton's presidency.
Thousands of documents released Friday, which detail that failure as well as other policy disputes of the Clinton White House, provide new details on what remains one of the defining chapters in Hillary Clinton's career. The papers also foreshadow the challenges the Obama administration would encounter as the current president worked to pass the Affordable Care Act 16 years later.
Nervous and egotistic members of Congress, difficult policy issues such as whether individuals should be required to buy insurance, and worries that the administration might be promising more than it could deliver all feature prominently in the documents, released Friday by the National Archives.
So, too, does a steady current of concern by White House staffers over the arcane policy as well as the process that the first lady had established.
"By far the biggest problem is the complexity," White House advisor Mike Lux noted in a January 1994 memo. "The complexity of the bill is not only confusing, but frightening."
The roughly 4,000 pages of documents the first of as many as 33,000 pages scheduled to be released in the next several weeks do not appear to contain bombshell revelations. The papers had been sealed for more than 12 years under the Presidential Records Act, which allows certain memos to be withheld if they contain confidential advice or information related to federal appointments.
The ardor with which both Republican and Democratic operatives dissected them testified to how much the 2016 presidential election already has come to focus on Clinton's so-far-undeclared candidacy.
The documents clearly illustrate the central role that she played in advancing what was her husband's top priority after he took office in 1993. As first lady, Clinton led a massive task force to draft a plan to build a new health insurance system to control costs and expand coverage.
Clinton's advisors repeatedly warned her that the White House should be deferential to Congress.
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Papers offer peek into Hillary Clinton's failed healthcare initiative