President Obama held a press conference yesterday (see video above), and it turned into a masterful attack by the President against Republicans on the Affordable Care Act:
When he received his first question regarding the ACA, President Obama happily said, “yeah, let’s talk about that.” Obama then answered:
I recognize that their party is going through the stages of grief — anger and denial and all that stuff, and we’re not at acceptance yet…. We have eight million people signed up through the exchanges. That doesn’t include the three million young people who are able to stay on their parents’ plan, it doesn’t include the three million people who benefitted from expansions of Medicaid. So if my math is correct that’s 14 million right there. You’ve got another five million people who signed up outside of the marketplaces but are part of the same insurance pool. So we’ve got a sizable part of the U.S. population now that are, for the first time in many cases, to enjoy the financial security of health insurance.
Then President Obama made it personal:
I saw a woman yesterday, young woman, maybe 34, with her mom and her dad. She’s got two small kids, a self-employed husband, and was diagnosed with breast cancer. And this isn’t an abstraction to her. She is saving her home. She is saving her business. She is saving her parents’ home, potentially, because she’s got health insurance which she just could not afford.
Obama went on to do a great job of framing the ACA issue:
The question now becomes, if in fact this is working for a lot of people but there’s still improvements to make, why are we still having a conversation about repealing the whole thing, and why are we having folks say that any efforts to improve it are somehow handing Obama a victory? This isn’t about me. And my hope is that we start moving beyond that. My suspicion is that probably will not happen until after November, because it seems as if this is the primary agenda item in the Republican political platform.
The President then added one last attack against the Republicans:
This does frustrate me. States that have chosen not to expand Medicaid for no other reason than political spite. You have five million people who could be having health insurance right now at no cost to these states, zero cost to these states, other than ideological reasons that they have chosen not to provide health insurance for their citizens. That’s wrong. That should stop. Those folks should be able to get health insurance like everybody else.
Indeed, the very next question was, “Do you think it’s time for Democrats to start campaigning loudly and positively on the benefits of Obamacare, and will you lead that charge?” President Obama answered:
I think Democrats should forcefully defend and be proud of the fact that millions of people like the woman I just described, who I saw in Pennsylvania yesterday, we’re helping because of something we did. I don’t think we should apologize for that, I don’t think we should be defensive about it. I think there is a strong, good, right story to tell.
Talk about going on offense with a masterful performance that puts your opponents in a box. Talk about furthering the Democratic narrative of protection and security. Not only did President Obama sound confident and happy to talk about the ACA, you can see by his body language that he looked confident and happy too. Obama’s good feelings about the Affordable Care Act reflect the speed in which the ACA’s fortunes have turned around. Just a few weeks ago, much of the talk about the ACA still dwelt on healthcare.gov glitches of October 2013. Indeed, the timing of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius‘ recent resignation arguably couldn’t be better — it was right after announcing the success of over 7 million new enrollees in the ACA, and seven months before the 2014 elections in which, as Obama noted, the Republicans want to run solely against the ACA.
President Obama once again seems to be playing chess when others are playing checkers. Hopefully, some nervous Democratic candidates will catch on soon that the Affordable Care Act worm has turned, and that ACA is an achievement to run on in 2014.
