It wasn’t Hillary Clinton, but her campaign sent a rep that still drew a crowd.
 
Former President Bill Clinton stopped in Wilmington on Wednesday morning as part of his two-day bus tour of eastern North Carolina campaigning for his wife as the Democratic presidential candidate.
 
“First of all has this been a weird election or what?” he said, kicking off his remarks to supporters – and one vocal heckler who was escorted out. The audience gathered in Cape Fear Community College’s outdoor amphitheater, just a short walk from one of the area’s early voting sites where ballots already are being cast in the race.
 
Campaign organizers estimated that the event drew about 1,600 people.
 
Bill Clinton made other stops Wednesday in Fayetteville and Pembroke, while first lady Michelle Obama is slated to join Hillary Clinton on Thursday in Winston-Salem. Meanwhile, GOP candidate Donald Trump, who visited Wilmington in August, was scheduled to be in Charlotte and Kinston on Wednesday.

It's a last-minute push in a state still seen as a close and important win for both candidates. North Carolina broke for Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
 
In his speech Wednesday, Bill Clinton touted his wife’s stances on issues from small business lending to college student debt, while also defending health care reform, which has come under scrutiny this week because of expected premium jumps.
 
“There’s been a lot of publicity about health care in the past couple of days,” Bill Clinton said. “Here’s what I want to say about this: The last thing we should do is repeal the health care law.”
 
New premium rates for plans in the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges were released this year ahead of open enrollment. The report from the Department of Health and Human Services showed a 25 percent average increase in premiums on one of the popular health plans, for states that use the federal exchanges instead of setting up their own.
 
Bill Clinton defended the program and said Hillary Clinton’s platform includes fixes for it.
 
“We’ve got more than 90 percent of Americans with health insurance for the first time ever,” he said, adding, “You don’t want to take that health insurance away from people. A hundred percent of us are better off because none of us can be denied buying health insurance for a preexisting condition.”

Bill Clinton turned to Hillary Clinton’s proposals to allow people aged 55 and older to join Medicare and a public-option insurance plan as ways to make the insured pools bigger.
 
“If you’re a small business person, if there’s only 200 or only 2,000 people in your pool,” he said, “then you’ve got to hedge against one bad year where there’s a disproportionate number of sick people.”
 
With the timing of the new rates, the Trump campaign has zeroed in on the Affordable Care Act's implementation.
 
“North Carolinians also agree that the 24% increase in their premiums next year is an outrageous and unfair tax on the average Tar Heel voter and Donald Trump’s proposal to repeal and replace this onerous law is the only sensible plan to remove this burden that gets worse every year,” Jason Simmons, the state director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement Wednesday in response to Bill Clinton’s tour. “Hillary’s support for plans like Obamacare, tax increases, and oppressive regulations shows she's not the right fit for the Old North State.”