Hillary Clinton in Democratic Health Care Forum in Las Vegas

On Health Care: 1990s healthcare reforms laid groundwork for today’s reforms

On Health Care: Insurers must fund prevention without preexisting conditions

A: Well, let’s start with the insurance companies. The insurance companies make money by spending a lot of money and employing a lot of people to try to avoid insuring you, and then, if you’re insured, to try to avoid paying for the health care you received.. My office spends a lot of effort helping people who have insurance get health care. The insurance companies don’t want to pay for preventative health care because that’s like a lost amount of money because they’re not sure that the patient or the insured person will still be with them. That is upside down and backwards. So we could save money if we changed the incentive to require that preventative health care and wellness be covered and incentivized, and we could require that every insurance company had to insure everybody and no exclusions for preexisting conditions.

On Health Care: Require electronic medical record for all federal healthcare

After Hurricane Katrina I went down to Houston to see the people who had been evacuated, most in them from the convention center. The elderly, the frail. People who were very dependent upon health care, their records were gone. Those 15 pieces of paper were destroyed. And a lot of doctors told me their biggest problem was trying to figure out what prescriptions to give to people. The only people they could help were the people who had shopped at chain drug stores because they had electronic medical records. If we had that for all of our health records, we’d get costs down & we’d have higher quality health care.