Clinton defends call for Obama to honor health plan commitment

Former President Bill Clinton says he was trying to support President Obama in November when he said Obama should honor his “if you like it, you can keep it” promise on healthcare plans.

“I was trying to be supportive of him. I don’t think you can find anybody in America who’s worked harder for his reelection, or support of this bill, or went out of his way to explain the bill to the American people more than I did,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN en Espanol’s Juan Carlos Lopez. The full interview will air at 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

{mosads}Last month, Clinton said in an interview that he believed Obama needed to honor the commitment made to people in the run-up to the healthcare law’s passage, and Obama’s reelection.

Millions of Americans received cancellation notices from their insurance companies after the Oct. 1. launch of the federal insurance marketplace. 

Obama then announced his own fix to the healthcare law, which allows insurance companies to continue offering policies that would have been canceled under ObamaCare for one more year.

“I said nothing about this, not one word, until the president himself spoke,” Clinton said Tuesday on CNN. “It was obvious to me listening to him that he wanted the American people to feel that he had kept his commitment and that they didn’t understand that he in fact did grandfather in—that is protect—all the policies that were in existence on the day he signed the healthcare bill. That was done.”

Obama didn’t take over the insurance industry, Clinton added. Less than 20 percent of the 11 million policies that exist in the individual insurance market existed when Obama signed the law in 2010, he said.