These days when Hillary Clinton is on the stump, one of her stock lines is telling the audience that before ObamaCare there was HillaryCare. Yes, in the early days of her husband’s administration, Hillary was tasked with getting the public ready for (unconstitutional) government intrusion into the personal matter of health care. And she failed spectacularly.

When leftists try to give Uncle Sam more of a say in the medical realm it can be politically perilous. We know what happened to Hillary, and ObamaCare hangs like an albatross around our current president’s neck. Running against government involvement in health care has been a huge winner for Republicans, who used the issue to upend Democrat House majorities twice in 16 years, 1994 and 2010. Is it just a coincidence that the GOP made Democrat health care policies an issue in these elections? People are also voting with their feet, as enrollment figures continue to fall short of estimates and people work out ways to avoid the “shared responsibility payment” the IRS slaps on scofflaws.

Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, writes, “On one hand you have the theory: The [Affordable Care Act] will finally address the problem of the uninsured in America. On the other hand, you have a reality produced by politics and unintended consequences.”

That reality, along with the poor economy to which the ObamaCare debacle has lent a hand, has cost the Democrats hundreds of federal, state and local elected offices over the last three election cycles.

Undaunted, Clinton is using what she considers the success of ObamaCare to suggest a number of “improvements” such as allowing more “free” doctor visits, tax credits for those who pay more than a certain amount of their income for health expenses, and other measures to reduce out-of-pocket costs. Naturally, these would be paid for by more regulations and restrictions on providers.

There are those who argue, however, that Clinton is just taking slower baby steps toward the same single-payer system her socialist opponent Bernie Sanders is advocating. Evidence of that comes with her idea of bringing back the “public option” intended for ObamaCare but scrapped when centrist Democrats wouldn’t back it.

But in the “progressive” mind, we’re still on the inexorable path toward government-provided health care for all. “Eventually, we’re going to move into a single-payer plan,” said Robert Reich, who served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor. “The question is whether we do it sooner or later.”

Sooner would likely be defined as the timeframe in which Bernie Sanders would work as opposed to that more incremental approach of Hillary Clinton — or, arguably, Donald Trump.

However, the state from which Sanders hails backed away from its own proposal to adopt a single-payer system in 2014. Vermont’s Democrat governor, Peter Shumlin, managed to keep a lid on the proposed $2 billion price tag just long enough to eke out re-election, winning by barely 2,000 votes in a state Barack Obama carried with 67% of the vote in 2012. Single-payer would have entailed both a double-digit payroll tax on Vermont businesses as well as a 9.5% personal income tax hike. So much for “free” health care. And when you contemplate the $2 billion cost for one state alone, consider the fact that the population of Vermont is but 0.2% of the nation as a whole. Extrapolate those numbers, and we could be staring at a trillion dollars each year for government-supplied health care. Better begin planting those money trees.

Perhaps Hillary’s strategy is sound, because by contrasting her ideas to Sanders’s budget-busting “free” health care scheme, she almost — almost — sounds reasonable.