Obama Clearly Explains "Obamacare"

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• published: 02 May 2013
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President Obama explaining that most of the Affordable Care Act - aka, Obamacare - has been implemented for people who have insurance through their employers and clarified that the other part of the law to be implemented are the exchanges that will allow individuals to buy insurance in an "exchange" where companies will compete for their business. Subscribe to The Daily Conversation http://bit.ly/WZnLnd Join the conversation on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/thedailyconversation Add TDC to your circles on Google+ https://plus.google.com/100134925804523235350/posts Follow The Daily Conversation on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/thedailyconvo "I think that any time you're implementing something big, there's going to be people who are nervous and anxious about is it going to get done, until it's actually done. But let's just step back for a second and make sure the American people understand what it is that we're doing. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — has now been with us for three years. It's gone through Supreme Court tests. It's gone through efforts to repeal. A huge chunk of it has already been implemented. And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they're already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don't know it. Their insurance is more secure. Insurance companies can't drop them for bad reasons. Their kids are able to stay on their health insurance until they're 26 years old. They're getting free preventive care. So there are a whole host of benefits that, for the average American out there, for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, this thing has already happened. And their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That's it. They don't have to worry about anything else. The implementation issues come in for those who don't have health insurance — maybe because they have a preexisting condition and the only way they can get health insurance is to go out on the individual market, and they're paying 50 percent or 100 percent more than those of us who are lucky enough to have group plans; people who are too poor to get health insurance and the employers don't offer them. Maybe they work for a small business and this small business can't afford right now to provide health insurance. So all the implementation issues that are coming up are implementation issues related to that small group of people, 10 to 15 percent of Americans — now, it's still 30 million Americans, but a relatively narrow group — who don't have health insurance right now, or are on the individual market and are paying exorbitant amounts for coverage that isn't that great. And what we're doing is we're setting up a pool so that they can all pool together and get a better deal from insurance companies. And those who can't afford it, we're going to provide them with some subsidies. That's it. I mean, that's what's left to implement, because the other stuff has been implemented and it's working fine. The challenge is that setting up a market-based system, basically an online marketplace where you can go on and sign up and figure out what kind of insurance you can afford and figuring out how to get the subsidies — that's still a big, complicated piece of business. And when you're doing it nationwide, relatively fast, and you've got half of Congress who is determined to try to block implementation and not adequately funding implementation, and then you've got a number of members of — or governors — Republican governors — who know that it's bad politics for them to try to implement this effectively, and some even who have decided to implement it and then their Republican-controlled state legislatures say, don't implement, and won't pass enabling legislation — when you have that kind of situation, that makes it harder. But having said all that, we've got a great team in place. We are pushing very hard to make sure that we're hitting all the deadlines and the benchmarks."