Obama Will Point to a Health Law’s Success
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
In Boston on Wednesday, the president is expected to compare the new health care law to Massachusetts’ plan.
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: October 30, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama will travel to Boston on Wednesday to
promote the success of the Massachusetts health care program on which
the Affordable Care Act was based, while Mr. Obama’s top health official
faces an intense grilling on Capitol Hill about the national law’s
troubled rollout.
In a speech at historic Faneuil Hall, where the president’s one-time
rival for the White House, Mitt Romney, signed the state’s health
program into law in 2006, Mr. Obama is expected to argue that the
similarities between the two laws should give the public confidence that
the problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act will eventually fade.
“The bottom line is it ramped up to success,” Jonathan Gruber, a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of the
state program. Mr. Gruber, who advised both Mr. Romney, the
Massachusetts governor at the time, and Mr. Obama on the health care
laws, spoke to reporters on Tuesday evening during a White House
conference call.
“We’ve covered two-thirds of our uninsured citizens. We’ve lowered
premiums in the individual market. And we have a widely popular law,
with about two-thirds public support for our law,” Mr. Gruber said of
the Massachusetts law. “That same kind of outcome will happen at the
national level, but it will take time. We need to be patient and measure
the outcomes in months and years, not days and weeks.”
Lawmakers from both parties have expressed little interest in being
patient in the wake of the malfunctioning HealthCare.gov website, which
has only partially worked since opening for customers on Oct. 1.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, is
scheduled to testify Wednesday morning at a hearing of the House Energy
and Commerce Committee on the website’s problems. She is expected to
face tough questions about who was responsible for the failure of the
website and broader criticisms from Republicans about the impact of the
Affordable Care Act on the marketplace for insurance in the country.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, said in a
statement Tuesday night that “every which way you look at it, Obamacare
has proven to be a train wreck – with problems that run far beyond its
AOL-era website. A law that was delivered through a pack of fictitious
promises can’t be saved by another misleading speech.”
White House aides said the president’s trip to Boston was also designed
to highlight the bipartisan nature of the health care debate in
Massachusetts. In 2006, Mr. Romney was joined at the Faneuil Hall
signing by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democratic
champion of health care.
“Republicans and Democrats came together to not only push the reform
through, but more importantly, after the bill was signed and enacted
into law, everybody came together once it was law to make sure that
health reform in Massachusetts worked,” said David Simas, a senior White
House adviser.
That stands in stark contrast, White House officials said, to the
situation in Washington, where Republicans have been actively seeking to
undermine the president’s health care law since the day it passed. The
White House officials said Republicans must bear some of the
responsibility for problems in the rollout.
In particular, Republicans have seized on the problems with the website
as evidence that federal officials will be unable to woo enough young,
healthy people to buy insurance. Republican lawmakers have demanded to
know how many people have successfully signed up for insurance through
the Affordable Care Act. Administration officials have said they will
release those numbers for October in mid-November.
But Mr. Gruber said enrollment in the Massachusetts health care plan
also started slowly. Only 123 people signed up for insurance during the
first month that Mr. Romney’s plan was in place. By the end of the first
year, more than 36,000 people had signed up, he said. He predicted that
the same pattern will hold true for the national health care law.
“We didn’t freak out about daily or weekly movements; we looked at it
monthly,” Mr. Gruber said. “And we recognized this would ramp up slowly,
as it did.”
During the 2012 campaign, Mr. Obama’s aides often took pleasure in
noting that the president’s health care plan was closely modeled after
Mr. Romney’s own effort — even as the Republican candidate became a
frequent critic of the national version. The trip to Boston on Wednesday
is designed to undermine Republican criticism in the Congress by
highlighting the health care law’s Republican roots.
But the speech is unlikely to change many minds on Capitol Hill, where
criticism of the president’s health law has become an article of faith
regardless of who came up with the idea first.
And one person who won’t be at Faneuil Hall on Wednesday? White House
aides confirmed they did not ask Mr. Romney to attend the speech.
“No,” said Mr. Simas, “there’s no outreach to Governor Romney.”
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