Clinton, Huckabee champion healthcare at AARP event
Senator Hillary Clinton told an enthusiastic crowd of seniors gathered for the annual AARP convention yesterday that she would work to improve healthcare and retirement if she's elected president.
More than 3,200 seniors packed into the main ballroom at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, and another 3,000 crowded into overflow rooms, to hear the Democratic candidate from New York.
"I want to be sure that we finally once and for all have a quality affordable healthcare system for every single American," she told the crowd to cheers. "Healthcare should not be a privilege for the few, but a right for every single person."
She said the country has to work to get health costs down, improve quality, and cover everyone, and if it does not, "we will break faith with who we are as a nation." Having 47 million uninsured Americans, she said, poses "a moral imperative."
Clinton also promised to renew the country's commitment to Social Security, keeping her message in line with the group's Divided We Fail campaign, introduced this summer to put healthcare and retirement on the agenda of the presidential candidates.
AARP launched the campaign in conjunction with the Business Roundtable and the Service Employees International Union. Together, the groups are spending more than $60 million, focusing on 10 states.
Clinton said she plans to lay out her proposals to ensure universal coverage Thursday, the third in a series of healthcare plans she has outlined. She has already introduced plans to lower national healthcare spending by at least $120 billion a year and to create a public-private group that would oversee healthcare quality.
During a question-and-answer session, she told the crowd she had learned a lot about how to work with Congress to pass a healthcare plan in her unsuccessful attempt in 1993 as first lady.
Earlier in the day, former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas spoke before a smaller crowd of about 500 people in the adjacent Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, competing against an appearance by Joan and Melissa Rivers.
The Republican presidential candidate flashed his AARP membership card to a cheering crowd and, later, signed a poster board of the Divided We Fail pledge card.
The AARP invited all the presidential candidates to appear, said Chryste Hall, a spokeswoman for AARP Massachusetts, but only Huckabee and Clinton accepted.
The nonpartisan group does not endorse candidates, but it has said that one in four people who voted in the last presidential campaign nationwide were members.
Both Clinton and Huckabee said the US healthcare system had failed to provide enough preventative care and both said that some insurance companies will pay to remove a diabetic's foot should it become infected, but would not pay for visits to a podiatrist.
"I don't believe we have so much a healthcare crisis, as we have a health crisis," Huckabee said, suggesting the country spends far too many healthcare dollars treating, rather than preventing, chronic diseases.
Referring more than once to his own diagnosis with Type 2 diabetes and his struggle to lose weight, Huckabee said the healthcare culture needs to change to combat overeating, underexercising, and smoking. "We have to take a different level of responsibility for our health," he said.
