Bill Clinton told the nation Americans can stay with their insurance plans and doctors back when he was peddling health-care reform in 1993.
In his Sept. 22, 1993, national address on health care, Clinton explained said the nation's health-care system "must be simpler for the patients and simpler for those who actually deliver health care; our doctors, our nurses, our other medical professionals."
"Today we have more than 1,500 insurers with hundreds and hundreds of different forms. … Under our proposal there would be one standard insurance form, not hundreds of them," he explained.
Clinton’s stated plan called for coverage for all.
“Unless everybody is covered, we will never be able to fully put the brakes on health care inflation,” he said.
He promised that Americans could keep their current health-care plans and doctors.
“Americans believe they ought to be able to choose their own health-care plan, keep their own doctors, and I think all of us agree. Under any plan we pass, they ought to have that right,” Clinton stated.
His administration proposed "to give every American a choice among high-quality plans."
"You can stay with your current doctor, join a network of doctors and hospitals, or join a health maintenance organization," he said. "If you don't like your plan, every year you'll have the chance to choose a new one."
Last week, in what was seen as a stern rebuke, Clinton exhorted President Obama to uphold his pledge that Americans can keep their health-care plans.
“Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Clinton said.
As a presidential candidate in 2007, Hillary Clinton also made a commitment that Americans could keep their doctors and insurance plans under her health-care-reform proposal.
"You can keep the doctors you know and trust. You keep the insurance you have," Clinton stated Sept. 17, 2007, at a campaign stop at a Des Moines, Iowa, hospital. "If you have private insurance you like, nothing changes – you can keep that insurance."
With research by Brenda J. Elliott.