Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are not backing away from Obamacare despite the uproar. That was clear from numerous comments on the Sunday talk shows.
Millions of Americans have had their health insurance plans cancelled, the Obamacare exchange website does not work and President Obama apologized this past week for Obamacare’s failures since it took effect on October 1.
The vibe was so bad that 39 Democrats joined Republicans this past week to pass a bill to fix Obamacare sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.). Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) said he would not wait for the president to fix Obamacare with his constitutionally questionable administrative fix.
“I am not waiting for the president’s promise. I want to see results,” Begich said on “Fox and Friends” in the past week.
Pelosi, the current House minority leader, along with other Democrats bent over backwards to defend the law.
Pelosi notoriously said back in 2010 that “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it beyond the fog of the controversy.”
Now that we know what is in it beyond the fog of the controversy, Pelosi is not backing down.
“I stand by what I said there,” Pelosi said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When people see what is in the bill they will like it and they will. And so while there is a lot of hoop de doo and a doo about what’s happening now, that is very appropriate, and I’m not criticizing.
“The Affordable Care Act is right up there with Social Security, Medicare – affordable care for all Americans – as a right, not a privilege,” Pelosi said. “The rollout of the website – that’s terrible, but the fact is that will be fixed”
Pelosi dismissed questions from host David Gregory asking about the millions of American whose plans have been cancelled since October 1, saying that nothing in the law requires such cancellations.
“There isn’t anything in the law that says that if you like what you had before 2010 you couldn’t keep it,” Pelosi said.
Yet the number of workers covered under policies grandfathered under Obamacare has dropped from 56 percent in 2011 to a mere 36 percent in 2013.
CNN Crossfire host and former Obama Green Jobs Czar Van Jones similarly defended the law on CNN’s “State of the Union with Candy Crowley.”
“Right now all of the focus is on a broken website and the subsequent broken promise, and that’s been the story for the past couple of weeks,” Jones said. “At some point there are other stories to be told about Obamacare. What I think is important is that you do have places like California and Kentucky where people’s lives are being transformed by Obamacare. Everyone in America does have this option now to not be discriminated against.
“There are millions of Americans with a broken website still who are benefiting from Obamacare.”
Since Obamacare passed in 2010 healthcare has become less affordable for the average American as more and more employers have shifted into plans with deductibles (annual out-of-pocket costs) of $1,000 or more.
In 2009 13 percent of all businesses were enrolled in such plans, but for this year that number has more than doubled to 28 percent, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That number has risen by approximately 20 percent in same time period for individuals who work for small firms with less than 200 employees – rising from 40 percent in 2009 to 58 percent in 2013.
Kaiser found that the number of employers offering health coverage has dropped since the passage of Obamacare from 69 percent in 2010 to just 57 percent in 2013.
Such statistics show that the law has made healthcare less affordable.
