Twenty years ago, Clinton's health care plan was on to something. But you wouldn't know it from Democratic policy since then. Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' recent comments doubting that Obamacare’s employer mandate will ever be implemented—he called it “one of the first things to go”—likely caused heartburn among his onetime West Wing colleagues. But there’s one former Obama administration official whom Gibbs must have terrified more than most.

Years ago, that famous figure testified publicly that if Congress were to pass legislation with an individual mandate to purchase insurance, “we worry that the numbers of people who currently are insured through their employment will decrease because there will no longer be any reason for many employers” to offer coverage, when individuals can receive government subsidies instead.

That figure’s name is Hillary Clinton.

It is a well-known fact that Clinton came to strenuously support an individual health insurance mandate in her 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama. Less well-remembered, however, is that Clinton considered an employer mandate—not an individual mandate—the best way to achieve “universal coverage” in her health care task force’s ill-fated 1993 proposal, put forth while she was first lady.

Back then, both Hillary and President Bill Clinton believed that placing responsibility primarily on individuals, as opposed to employers, to obtain coverage could cause employers to drop their existing plans. Little wonder that after millions of Americans had their health plans canceled last fall, Bill Clinton criticized President Obama’s “if you like your health care plan” promise; in fact, the Clinton White House knew that pledge was dubious two decades before Politifact finally named it the “lie of the year.”

The Clintons were onto something at the time, but the health policies they and their party have since advocated have not only failed to solve our nation’s health care problems—in some cases, they’ve made them worse. Read two decades later, Clinton’s 1993 congressional testimony reinforces both what has changed and what has not.

Consider another truth the Hillary Clinton of 1993 could tell Obama today. “If we subsidize individuals below a certain income level,” she noted in her testimony before Congress, “there would be pressure on employers to keep wages below the subsidy level so that they [health insurance premiums] would continue to be paid for by the government.” That sounds a lot like what the Congressional Budget Office concluded in February: that Obamacare will reduce the labor force by the equivalent of 2.3 million workers, because employers will not raise wages and individuals will choose not to work in order to retain access to government insurance subsidies.