If Hillary Clinton is elected president, her first priority on health care is clear: defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

"I am not going to let them rip away the progress we made, I am not going to let them tear up that law, kick 16 million people off health coverage and force this country to start the health care debate all over again," said the former First Lady and Secretary of State recently.

Indeed, during her unsuccessful campaign for president in 2008, Clinton was defending a key aspect of the current PPACA that even then-Sen. Barack Obama did not support at the time: the individual mandate.

But in the midst of a spirited primary challenge on the left from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton is under pressure to explain to the party base how she will go beyond PPACA to improve access to health care.

“My attitude is, look, we’ve got some good things done, let’s preserve what works and fix what doesn’t,” Clinton said last week, according to the New York Times.

Read: Big pharma slams Clinton prescription drug strategy

Sanders and many in the party base believe PPACA remains fundamentally flawed because it operates within a for-profit insurance system. Many were furious that PPACA did not include a public option or that Democrats did not try to scrap the entire system in favor of the single-payer model of health care favored by most other western countries.

In light of this complicated political dynamic, Clinton released a plan to bring down costs on Tuesday. Among other things, she called for rules that cap the monthly amount consumers can pay out-of-pocket on drugs and called for allowing the federal government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies over the price of Medicare drugs.

Clinton also wants to allow Americans to order medicine from other countries, where drugs are often cheaper and to impose restrictions on profits that pharmaceuticals reap from medications that were developed with assistance from federal subsidies.

While health care is playing nowhere near as prominent a role in the GOP presidential primary as it has in years past, all of the Republicans who aspire to occupy the White House have been clear in their opposition to Obamacare.

In many instances, however, it remains largely unclear what alternatives they are proposing. More importantly, when they do propose alternatives, it is unclear whether they offer a realistic opportunity to keep the uninsured rate as low as it has become since the Affordable Care Act was put in place.

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