In Boston, Obama Will Point to a Health Law’s Success

Obama Will Point to a Health Law’s Success
In Boston on Wednesday, the president is expected to compare the new health care law to Massachusetts’ plan.

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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