… or was it Sally Jesse Raphael?
At times it felt more like a cozy, daytime TV studio than a high-stakes last-minute stop before the Super Tuesday presidential primaries when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton came to town Monday morning. Clinton hosted a 90-minute women’s roundtable talk about health care at the Yale Child Study Center.
The appearance reflected two thrusts of Clinton’s campaign as Connecticut and 21 other states (plus American Samoa) prepare to vote on Tuesday: A pitch to women. And a focus on health care.
Amid personal and policy-oriented conversation, Clinton delivered a four-minute prepared news bite: A renewal of her call for achieving universal health care by opening up U.S. Congress’s own health plan to the nation’s 47 million uninsured people as well as under-insured people.
Clinton pitched the plan as smart politics, a way to grab the universal health care grail that eluded her in the Clinton I years.
Her plan could pass, she argued, because Democrats already support universal health care; and Republican lawmakers would be hard pressed to vote against giving everyday Americans the same health care plan they themselves receive.
“If it’s good enough for Congress,” she said, “It’s good enough for everybody else.”
She said she learned from the collapse of her health care plan in 1994 that it works best to build on an existing plan. Even though people want change, they also fear it, she said. Her plan would rely on the private market and allow people to keep their current insurance plans if they like them.
Click on the play arrow to watch Clinton make the case and detail her proposal.
Clinton said she’d pay for the plan in part by removing the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 a year. If they return to paying the income tax rates they paid in the 1990s, she said, the country would have another $55 billion to pay for health care. She’d also offer low-income people tax credits to help pay for her plan.
A Friendly Island
Monday’s event took place at a friendly island within decidedly Barack Obama territory: New Haven, and Yale. The 200 people jammed into a second-floor conference room included lots of top statewide politicians, like Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, the mayors of Stamford and Bridgeport (as well as 2006 Congressional candidate Diane Farrell, pictured at the top of the story with Clinton). Noticeably absent were New Haven’s mayor, all but one of its state legislators, all but one alderman (Alex Rhodeen, whose father, Penn, introduced his old friend Hillary), top Yale officials, even many leading figures from Clinton’s alma mater, Yale Law School. Obama fever has gripped New Haven’s political establishment, its activists, as well as much of Yale.
However, Yale Child Study remains home, and a safe place to erect a televised campaign tent, for Clinton. She worked there as a research assistant as a Yale law student in the early ’70s, participating in some cutting-edge work on child abuse and mainstreaming students with disabilities.
At a time when Obama momentum has put her once-solid national lead in peril, the Yale Child Study visit offered supporting surroundings as well as a stage for Clinton’s command of health-care issues.
Props were assembled, including a toy-filled table set for Isabella Ray (pictured), 5, and her 8‑year-old brother Austin. Their mom was on the panel.
Acting as emcee, Clinton nodded, took notes, and added sisterly seconds to the stories of the 11 women selected to sit around a wooden conference table and tell their stories. Some were single parents telling of struggles to pay health insurance or afford medicine or child care, wrestle with family members’ cancer or asthma of mental illness.
When one low-income mom from Waterbury spke of having five children — then corrected herself to say say four, since one had grown up and left home — Clinton interjected without missing a beat. “You’re always a mother,” she said. “It never ends.” Knowing laughter rippled through the studio audience.
The panel included recently retired New Haven police Det. Hilda Kilpatrck (pictured), who spoke of her experiences with young victims of violence as well as with people suffering from mental health problems.
Clinton also spoke of the need for more nursing professors to address a nursing shortage that coincides with an aging population.
During Monday’s show, Clinton introduced a second issue she has increasingly emphasized on the campaign trail: the nation’s foreclosure crisis, stemming from deterioration of the sub-prime mortgage market. She called for a moratorium on home foreclosures. Click on the play arrow to watch her discuss the issue.