Why Hillary Failed at Health Care

According to Economist Brad DeLong June 7, 2003
Hat tip Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal Best of the Web

“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.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key
senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she
told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her
that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them
(wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already
fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a
dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and
Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular
political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were
raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse
selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative
official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps
she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be
anything but an abysmal president.”