No, Clinton has not been after single payer for years

“But she wants to go to single payer, which means the government basically rules everything. Hillary Clinton has been after this for years.”— Donald Trump

Trump isn’t the first Republican to falsely claim that Hillary Clinton supports a single-payer health care system, where the government would completely oversee the delivery and financing of health care nationwide. But Clinton’s health care platform actually supports the use of a more modest “public option,” in which a government plan competes with private health insurance companies already in the market. It’s an idea she not only is supporting in this election cycle, but something she backed during her 2008 run for president.

Clinton has long said that a single-payer system — an idea beloved among the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party — is not feasible, and instead energies should be directed toward improving the Affordable Care Act’s flaws. It has been widely documented that she has not backed the more radical single-payer idea, which was championed by her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.