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Chelsea Clinton: ‘Affordable’ Part in Affordable Care Act Needs Work

October 5, 2016

Chelsea Clinton admitted Wednesday to the audience at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa that the "affordable" part of the Affordable Care Act needs some work.

"That being said, we know we do need to work on the ‘affordable’ part of the Affordable Care Act," Clinton said.

She then explained how her mother, Hillary Clinton, would make Obamacare more affordable as president.

"Just focused on the affordable part, my mom thinks, one, we need to finally do something that she first fought for back in 1993 when she worked really hard for universal healthcare coverage, and it didn’t work out," Clinton said.

She said that part of her mother’s 1993 plan was to "empower Medicare" to negotiate with drug companies by themselves.

"That would help do two important things," Clinton said. "One, it would help immediately, dramatically lower drug costs for our seniors."

The second point, she explained, was that Medicare has very transparent costs.

"And you can go online and you can see how much HHS, the Health and Human Services Department, kind of through Medicare, is paying for kind of services and drugs in those hospitals, and since pricing is transparent, it would be really hard for the drug companies to charge those of us not on Medicare yet even three times what they would be charging someone on Medicare, much less kind of thirty or three hundred times," she said.

Clinton’s comment comes two days after her father, former President Bill Clinton, called Obamacare a "crazy system."

"You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people that are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half," Bill Clinton said.

"It’s the craziest thing in the world," the former president added later.

Hillary Clinton has also criticized the Affordable Care Act in the past.