Obama reneges on health vow
‘You can keep your plan’ not true
Washi n gto n • President Barack Obama issued a mea culpa Thursday night for the botched rollout of his health care reforms, as the signature achievement of his presidency threatened to be derailed by technical glitches and a broken campaign promise.
“I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president, but I’ll wake up every single day working as hard as I can on behalf of Americans,” said Mr. Obama, as he issued a rare abject apology for “fumbling” the implementation of his Obamacare plan.
The launch of the reforms have been both a political and personal disaster for Mr. Obama who has been accused of misleading the American public by repeatedly pledging that everyone who already had health insurance would not be affected by Obamacare.
His oft-repeated campaign pledge — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” — has come back to haunt Mr. Obama as it emerged that millions of Americans were discovering this month that their health care plans were being cancelled, contrary to his assurances.
The president squirmed when pressed over whether he had known that his “you can keep it” pledge was actually only true for about 95% of Americans — misleading about 5% of the population, about 15 million people.
“With respect to the pledge I made that ‘If you like your plan you can keep it,’ there is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate,” Mr. Obama said, explaining that he believed a “grandfather clause” in the law would have covered those people now receiving cancellation notices.
However, while denying he had deliberately misled the public, Mr. Obama acknowledged that the debacle surrounding the Obamacare implementation had left him — and the Democrat politicians who have supported the new law — deeply damaged. “It’s legitimate for them to expect me to have to win back some credibility on this health-care law in particular and on a whole range of these issues in general,” the president admitted. “And, you know, that’s on me. I mean, we fumbled the rollout on this health-care law.”
In an attempt to head off that particular criticism and buy some time to fix the program, Mr. Obama announced an “administrative fix” that he said would enable everyone who wanted to keep their existing policies to do so.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the White House’s proposed changes would work. Or whether they would satisfy Republicans who have been opposed to the Obamacare reforms.
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House who last month precipitated a government shutdown in a bid to scale back the law, said he was “highly skeptical” the fix would be effective.
Mr. Obama’s decision to accept personal blame for the debacle comes after Democrats in both houses of Congress began to break ranks on the issue, fearing that public outrage over the new law could cost them their seats in next year’s mid-term election.
Some Democrat analysts fear that the backlash might also cost the party control of the 100-member Senate, leaving both Houses of Congress in the hands of Republicans and Mr. Obama as a lameduck president.
Despite these difficulties — as well as the fiasco of the Obamacare website, which has been virtually non-functional since its launch just over a month ago — and calls for a one-year delay in implementing the law, Mr. Obama said that he was “not going to walk away” from the millions of uninsured Americans and would press on with the reforms until they were working smoothly. Privately, White House officials remain convinced that much of the furor will be forgotten once the public starts to feel the benefits of the program in lower premiums and fewer of the loopholes that make insurance companies so unpopular.
It’s unclear what the impact of Thursday’s changes will be for the millions of people who have already had their plans cancelled. While officials said insurance companies will now be able to offer those people the option to renew their old plans, companies are not required to take that step.
The main industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, said Mr. Obama’s offer comes too late and could lead to higher premiums, since companies already have set 2014 rates based on the assumption that many people with individual coverage will shift over to the new markets created under Mr. Obama’s law. Karen Ignagni, president of the industry group, didn’t speculate on whether companies would extend coverage for those threatened with cancellation, but the group warned that “changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers.”
The administration is also promising improvements to a federal website so balky that enrolments totalled fewer than 27,000 in October in 36 states combined. Adding in enrolment of more than 79,000 in the 14 states with their own websites, the nationwide number of 106,000 October sign-ups was barely one-fifth of what officials had projected.