As he looks towards his legacy, in a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the president acknowledged the work is not yet done and laid out a path forward.
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“If we have learned one thing from Obamacare, it’s that government-run health care leads to higher costs, lower quality, and fewer choices for Americans – the President himself admitted this”, said Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), who worked with Ryan on a proposal to replace Obamacare. And Obama’s JAMA article, in combination with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s recent stump speeches advocating a public option will only reinforce that suspicion.
But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, in a statement to Roll Call, took a different stance. Cost-sharing subsidies bring down the out-of-pocket spending for many services, including generic drugs and primary-care visits, thereby making coverage more robust and on par with employer coverage, she said. Now, citing the law’s success, he is urging Congress to expand the insurance offerings.
So said the man responsible for the ACA, aka Obamacare, in an opinion article in JAMA. “We could have covered more ground more quickly with cooperation rather than obstruction”.
President Barack Obama is laying out a blueprint for addressing unsolved problems with his signature health law, including a renewed call for a “public option” to let Americans buy insurance from the government. “That’s also the thing that is going to prove most hard for future administrations who want to replace the ACA – they can’t yank health insurance from 20 million people”.
The Republican-controlled Congress has held some 60 votes to repeal or otherwise dismember the law, and Ryan recently rolled out a GOP alternative, though it’s unlikely to get a vote this year.
“While the lessons.may seem daunting, the ACA experience nevertheless makes me optimistic about this country’s capacity to make meaningful progress on even the biggest public policy challenges”, the president concluded.
“Some parts of the country have struggled with limited insurance market competition for many years, which is one reason that, in the original debate over health reform, Congress considered and I supported including a Medicare-like public plan”, Obama wrote.
Though Obama wrote in a wonky medical journal, he didn’t limit his elbow-throwing to Republicans.
On Monday, President Barack Obama formally embraced the “public option” – a plan that failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate in 2009, and which is widely hailed as a stepping-stone to universal, “single-payer”, state-controlled health care.
Drug companies, he writes, “oppose any change to drug pricing, no matter how justifiable and modest, because they believe it threatens their profits”. “We need to continue to tackle special interest dollars in politics”.
Based on this, it’s not surprising that an NPR poll taken in March showed that “more people say the law has hurt them than helped them”. She said the goal was to “point future policy makers in the right direction” on health care. “As this progress with health care reform in the United States demonstrates, faith in responsibility, belief in opportunity, and ability to unite around common values are what makes this nation great”. About 20 million Americans have gained coverage since the law was enacted in 2010, he wrote, and average growth in spending per person in the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled “has actually been negative” from 2010 to 2014. He credits the law with improving access to care and for improving the health of nonelderly adults.
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However, the president contends that a public option could help lower costs overall.
