(CNSNews.com) - Reigning in the costs of Obamacare "has to be the highest priority of the next president," Democrat Hillary Clinton said at Sunday's debate in St. Louis. "And I'm going to fix it," she promised.
That means more taxpayer money, Republican Donald Trump warned: "Their method of fixing it is to go back and ask Congress for more money, more and more money. We have right now almost $20 trillion in debt.
"Obamacare will never work. It’s very bad, very bad health insurance. Far too expensive. And not only expensive for the person that has it, unbelievably expensive for our country. It’s going to be one of the biggest line items very shortly.
"We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive and something that works, where your plan can actually be tailored. We have to get rid of the lines around the state, artificial lines, where we stop insurance companies from coming in and competing, because they want — and President Obama and whoever was working on it — they want to leave those lines, because that gives the insurance companies essentially monopolies. We want competition."
Trump said Clinton wants to go to a "single payer plan, also known as Medicare for all, where the government
You will have the finest health care plan there is. She wants to go to a single-payer plan, or government-funded insurance. He said it would be similar to what Canada has: "And if you haven’t noticed the Canadians, when they need a big operation, when something happens, they come into the United States in many cases because their system is so slow. It’s catastrophic in certain ways.
"But she wants to go to single payer, which means the government basically rules everything. Hillary Clinton has been after this for years. Obamacare was the first step. Obamacare is a total disaster. And not only are your rates going up by numbers that nobody’s ever believed, but your deductibles are going up, so that unless you get hit by a truck, you’re never going to be able to use it.
"It is a disastrous plan, and it has to be repealed and replaced."
Clinton said starting all over again might produce a "different system."
"But we have an employer-based system," she said. "That’s where the vast majority of people get their health care.
"And the Affordable Care Act was meant to try to fill the gap between people who were too poor and couldn’t put together any resources to afford health care, namely people on Medicaid" and "people who were working but didn’t have the money to afford insurance and didn’t have anybody, an employer or anybody else, to help them.
"That was the slot that the Obamacare approach was to take. And like I say, 20 million people now have health insurance. So if we just rip it up and throw it away, what Donald’s not telling you is we just turn it back to the insurance companies the way it used to be, and that means the insurance companie get to do pretty much whatever they want, including saying, look, I’m sorry, you’ve got diabetes, you had cancer, your child has asthma, you may not be able to have insurance because you can’t afford it.
"So let’s fix what’s broken about it, but let’s not throw it away and give it all back to the insurance companies and the drug companies. That’s not going to work," Clinton said.
Trump told Clinton, "Everthing" about Obamacare is "broken."
"Number two, Bernie Sanders said that Hillary Clinton has very bad judgment. This is a perfect example of it, trying to save Obamacare, which is a disaster."
Trump said the increased competition under his Obamacare replacement plan will allow continued coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.