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Obama on Marketplace roll-out: 2 fumbles, but working hard for fixes
News - Alicia Moulton - Nov. 14, 2013
Thursday, President Obama addressed two main concerns about the healthcare law and marketplace roll-out: First, website glitches for the Health Insurance Marketplace, and second, that he did not hold true to his promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” as many Americans are receiving notice letters that they are losing their current health care plans or that their plans are changing as a result of requirements on health insurance plans by the Affordable Care Act. “Right now everyone is properly focused on us not doing well in the roll-out,” Obama said. “There have been times where I’ve felt that we’ve been slapped around unjustly. This one is deserved.” Regarding the website, Obama said that he takes responsibility for the faulty roll-out and understands the frustration from the American public and from politicians in his own party. “We did fumble the ball on it, and we’re going to make sure that we get it fixed,” he said. “The improvement will be marked and noticeable… We’re working 24/7 to get it working for the large majority of Americans in a consistent way.” He said that the website should be working much better by November 30 or December 1, although he said he thinks it not possible for him to guarantee that it will work perfectly 100 percent of the time for all users. He said that evaluations will be done on how the government became so far behind schedule in rolling out the healthcare plan. He said that two challenges to the website’s development were that is it complicated and difficult to create a website that successfully compares different health insurance plans and that the IT programs in the federal government are, in general, over-budget and behind schedule. “The federal government doesn’t do well with IT procurement,” he said. “How we purchase technology in the federal government is cumbersome, complicated and outdated.” An audience member asked Obama why he proceeded so enthusiastically with releasing the healthcare marketplace when website testing several weeks earlier indicated that there were still major website glitches. "I did not have enough awareness about the problems in the website,” Obama said. “That doesn’t excuse the fact that they just don’t work, but we wouldn’t have rolled out something know that is doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” He said they are also working on fixing website technical problems and streamlining the health insurance marketplace application process to make it more user-friendly. Regarding his prior statement, “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” Obama says he understands the frustration of Americans who have received cancellation notices from their insurance because their current plans do not comply with new healthcare law. To Americans affected in this way, he said, “I hear you loud and clear…. I understand how upsetting this can be…. You’re going to be understandably aggravated about it.” Obama said he is offering an option in which Americans can stay on their current plans for one year, although this would not trump decisions made by state insurance commissioners. An audience member asked why Obama continued to say “if you like your plan, you can keep it” over and over even when his own statistics alerted him that this would not be the case. “My expectation was that for 98 percent of the American people, either [their plans] genuinely wouldn’t change at all or they would be pleasantly surprised with changes in the marketplace [and choose a new plan in the marketplace] or that the grandfather clause [in the ACA] would cover the rest,” Obama said. He said that the health insurance marketplace offers new options with better options in tax credits and better insurance at lower costs. “It’s important to understand that the old market was not working well,” Obama said. “And it’s important to not pretend that this is a good place to go back to.” He said he has resisted repealing the Affordable Care Act altogether because he doesn’t want to “be dragged back into a broken system.” He said that the U.S. health care system has been working well when people are healthy, but not when people are sick. He said that the individual market accounts for five percent of the population and that there are 40 millions Americans without health insurance who have been struggling to find affordable health care. Obama said that while trying to reform health care law, he learned that if you enact any reform, that negative consequences can be attributed to your law. He said that he believes that benefits from the ACA will be far greater than the negatives and that many people losing their current plans may actually be happier with a health insurance plan from the health insurance marketplace. He said that he sympathizes with Americans who are getting cancellation notices, but if their plans were not cancelled, they may be getting, instead, a notification of their premiums increasing or of being dropped from a certain type of coverage, merely by the state of the market previous to changes from the Affordable Care Act. “That’s the nature of the market that existed earlier,” he said. He said that his studies showed that over the last decade, that health insurance premiums have been increasing by an average of 15 percent annually. Obama said that when he sees Americans, primarily Republicans, protesting the healthcare law, he thinks, well what is it that you want to do? “The status quo is not working.” He said, therefore, he chose a path that he felt would be least disruptive and build off of the existing healthcare system to insure all Americans. “In this country everyone should be able to have the security of affordable healthcare,” he said. “That is what I feel so strongly about fixing it…. My pledge to the American people is that we are going to solve the problems that are there, we are going to get it right, and the Affordable Care Act is going to work for the American people.” He said that he is confident that by this time next year that Americans will look back and see that the law has helped many people. “We’re just going to keep on chipping away at this until the job is done,” he said. Obama said that the website glitches and people being dropped from their plan are like “two fumbles in a big game” but that “the game’s not over.” |
Watch a clip from President Obama's speech above. The full speech "President Obama Makes a Statement on the Affordable Care Act" was streamed live from http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/president-obama-makes-statement-affordable-care-act on November 14, 2013 just after 11:35 am ET.
Other Helpful Links:
New York Times article about Pres. Obama's remarks: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/us/politics/obama-to-offer-health-care-fix-to-keep-plans-democrat-says.html?hp&_r=0 |