What the first Clinton presidency suggests Hillary will do for affordable health care

by Daniel R. Hoffman, Ph.D.

Published May 2, 2016, 1:11 p.m. ET

It remains an axiom in fields as diverse as marketing research and political analysis that past behavior is a more reliable indicator of what people will do in the future than what they say they intend to do. A perusal of the first Clinton presidency, from January 1993 to January 2001, suggests that Hillary is likely to contribute little more than lip service to making medications and other health care affordable, despite her campaign promises.

As a starter, a review of Hillary's role in the first Clinton presidency should ignore the plea by her campaign and some women supporters who insist she should not be blamed for the dismal parts of her husband's record. Their caution is plainly a dodge that doesn't withstand scrutiny. Carl Bernstein's meticulously researched 2008 biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, makes the point that Hillary was Bill's most important and determined advisor on every issue of the first Clinton presidency. Bernstein goes so far as to claim that it is entirely appropriate to speak of the Clintons' White House years as a co-presidency.

Here are some noteworthy points from those two terms in the White House and an assessment of what they suggest about Hillary's likely approach to the goal of making medications and health care more affordable.

As their first major initiative the Clintons demonstrated their willingness to serve U.S. corporations by sacrificing American workers when they rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through a Democratic Congress in 1994.

The Bernstein biography maintains Hillary was Bill's main counselor on NAFTA. Their work in crafting and passing the legislation didn't just include some miscalculations, as they now claim, that can be rectified through renegotiations. To the contrary, the Clintons intended for the treaty to establish them as New Democrats who wouldn't hesitate to thumb their noses at traditional Democratic constituencies such as organized labor and ethnic minorities.

But efforts by the Clintons on NAFTA did not seek merely to diss a traditional Democratic voting bloc. The Clintons intended to show corporate America that they would not hesitate to cripple the political influence of those groups that were cornerstones of the Democratic Party's base since the New Deal. Congressman David Bonior of Michigan, the Democratic Majority Whip in the House, described NAFTA as an "operation for the multinational corporate elite...[While the Clintons] may think of this as one of [their] great achievements, it is one of the great disasters in modern economics."

The Clintons sold NAFTA as a treaty to remove tariffs, but its real purpose was to make it safe for American corporations to invest in Mexico without fear of expropriation. The treaty weakened the ability of labor unions by enabling U.S. employers to threaten moving their operations to Mexico if workers organized.

In 1993 the Clintons claimed that NAFTA would encourage U.S. exports to Mexico and, thereby, create jobs here. The opposite occurred over the next twenty years. Studies have shown it caused the loss of one million jobs in this country. In fact, NAFTA also contributed to rising income inequality. It suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers' collective bargaining powers and reduced fringe benefits.

By weakening organized labor in the U.S., the Clintons worsened the incomes and conditions of all working people in America.

With NAFTA in mind as a precedent, it appears likely that a president Hillary Clinton would try to sell drug reform legislation that pretends to make medications affordable while actually offering most American only marginal help and creating windfall profits for pharma.

Another major achievement of the first Clinton presidency was a crime bill that greatly expanded the mass incarceration of black people. In 1994 the Clintons promoted and signed what some observers consider the most draconian crime bill in a century. Among other things, the legislation created more than 100 mandatory minimum sentences. It granted prosecutors discretion to charge 13-year olds as adults, and doubled the number of federal crimes subject to the death penalty.

But its most infamous provision was the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Eighty-eight percent of the people arrested for crack are black, while the middle class uses powder cocaine. Yet the Clinton crime bill created decade-long sentences for crack and far lighter sentences for powder. It remains a major reason that black people now constitute a disproportionate part of the U.S. prison population.

In the 1994 midterm election the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, due in large part to the Clintons' failed health care initiative and public perceptions of Bill and Hillary as prevaricators who appear incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or accepting responsibility for their actions.

They responded by hiring Dick Morris as their chief political strategist, a man described by senior Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, as projecting "the look of a B-movie mob lawyer." Morris gave the term "triangulation" to the crux of his strategy for the Clintons. It essentially meant separating themselves from both Democrats and Republicans by "fast-forwarding" the agenda of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Toward that objective, Bill Clinton submitted a budget in June 1995 that cut more than a trillion dollars in federal spending.

The centerpiece of Clinton triangulation was a 1996 welfare bill that some observers characterized as the most drastic assault on the poor and the unemployed since Franklin Roosevelt introduced the New Deal. Among other provisions, the legislation set time limits on welfare eligibility and turned social assistance over to the states with requiring them to specify fair standards. It wiped out Aid to Families with Dependent Children that the original Social Security Act established. The legislation also made deep cuts in food stamp appropriations.

Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan called it "the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction."

Despite Hillary's putative concern for the fate of children, she urged her husband to sign the measure.

Although much of the public may think of the Clintons and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich as great rivals who sparred over a budget impasse that led to a government shutdown, by 1997 they became bosom buddies. In August of that year they collaborated on crafting a budget that gave Republicans the biggest tax cut in sixteen years. The top income bracket received 68 percent of the benefit. Their budget also reduced the capital gains tax by the largest margin in history and excluded more than a million dollars from estate tax levies.

The centerpiece of the 1997 Clinton-Gingrich budget was a hike in Medicare premiums.

Steven Gillon, resident historian of the History Channel and a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, described another budget collaboration that year between Gingrich and the Clintons that would have gutted Social Security. Only the Monica Lewinsky scandal derailed it.

Another major initiative from the Clintons took hold in 1997 when they responded to Wall Street importuning by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal legislation that separated investment from commercial banking. During the same year they promoted and signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that prevented government regulation of over-the-counter derivatives.

Both measures from the Clinton administration encouraged the mischief that led to the 2008 financial collapse and a recession that cost millions of people their jobs and homes.

No wonder Thomas Frank characterizes the 1993-2001 White House period as "the odious Clinton presidency."

************************

A post here in February scanned the sources of Hillary Clinton's campaign funding and donations to the Clinton Foundation. It concluded that the Clintons' avaricious pursuit of such funding makes it extremely unlikely she will cross her wealthy contributors and devote anything more than lip service to the affordability of drugs and health care.

Such empty promises form one of Hillary Clinton's core tendencies: talking as a progressive while acting to benefit the corporate elite at the expense of middle class consumers and taxpayers. Earlier in the 2016 campaign, Anderson Cooper asked her the following question:

"You were against same sex marriage. Now you're for it. You defended Obama's immigration policies. Now you say they're too harsh. You've supported trade deals dozens of times. Even called them the gold standard. Now suddenly you're against it. Will you say anything to get elected?"

Last week's post here discussed why a reckoning of Hillary's voting constituencies also predispose her to take deceptive action that is apt to produce negligible benefits for most Americans.

This week's review of the first Clinton presidency also makes it appear highly unlikely that Hillary would do anything progressive with respect to health care and prescription drugs.