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A persistent rumor that has been attached to Hillary Clinton for many years now, holding that sometime in the 1990s she made a disparaging remark about nurses. Although this rumor has been circulating for at least a decade now, concrete information about what she actually said, when she said it, or how the public was made aware of the comment has still not come to light. The rumor generally asserts that at sometime indefinite place and time, Hillary Clinton allegedly referred to nurses as glorified baby sitters or under-educated, overpaid maids. For example, on 6 February 2008 a user posted a message to the AllNurses forum inquiring about the former: As is often the case with apocryphal broadcast legends, many users responded by asserting that they distinctly remembered Clinton's making such a remark but could offer nothing documenting the event — attributing the lack of evidence to Clinton's statement's supposedly having been made before Internet usage became widespread: When a similar rumor was mentioned in the same forum in July 2016, this time holding that Clinton had called nurses overpaid and nothing but doctor's handmaidens, users again explained away the lack of evidence by asserting that this statement was made before everything [was] documented online: Although evidence is lacking, there's no shortage of accusations. In 2007, Clinton was accused of having said that nurses are overpaid and undereducated, and in August 2016 the image displayed above, holding that Clinton once called nurses overpaid maids was circulated on social media. The fact is, so many people could not legitimately have seen or heard Clinton make such a remark, as claimed, unless it was covered by the news media at the time — and yet no one has turned up any news source, print or broadcast, documenting that she ever said any such thing. That the event might have occurred before the days of widespread Internet usage is not sufficient to explain away the lack of proof — Bill Clinton's infamous $200 haircut occurred at about the same time as his wife's alleged remark did (1993), yet there is ample contemporaneous documentation of the former to be found both online and in archival sources. So how did this rumor get its start? Hillary Clinton was an advocate for health care reform during her time as First Lady, and in 1993 she chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. According to the Hillary Clinton Quarterly, she delivered her first speech on the subject on 18 June 1993 to a panel of governors in Woodstock, Vermont. What follows are a few quotes from this speech which may have been misremembered, misinterpreted, exaggerated, or spun into any of the aforementioned accusations: Parts of that speech could have been twisted into a political attack accusing Clinton of saying that nurses were overpaid and babysitters, even though the context of her speech makes it clear that she was talking about a broken health care system and not accusing nurses of being under-educated or overpaid. The rumored accusations also don't fit the general attitude that Hillary Clinton has expressed toward nurses, nor nurses towards her. In 2008, Clinton praised nurses as she walked a day in one of their shoes: The American Nurses Association (ANA) has also endorsed Hillary Clinton, both during both her presidential campaign in 2008 and again in 2016: We've reached out to the ANA for comment about Clinton's alleged remarks disparaging nurses, and while we have not yet heard back, the ANA did respond to a detractor on Twitter with a challenge to provide proof that Clinton made such comments. As expected, the response was one of the I can't find it, but I know I heard it variety: Hillary Clinton has been a major political figure for nearly 25 years. While it's true that the Internet is not a comprehensive database of everything that ever occurred in the history of the world, evidence of such a controversial public remark that widely seen by average citizens would surely have surfaced at some point by now if it existed.
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