In advance of a Supreme Court case that threatens to unravel the Affordable Care Act, President Obama made a moral appeal in defense of his signature health care law Tuesday.
The president argued his law is now “woven into the fabric of America,” saying he is “deeply cynical” about repeated attempts to “roll back progress.”
“I understood folks being skeptical or worried before the law passed and there wasn’t a reality there to examine, but once you see millions of people having health care, once you see that all the bad things that were predicted didn’t happen, you’d think that it’d be time to move on,” Obama said in a speech before the Catholic Health Association.
The Supreme Court will decide King v. Burwell later this month, weighing whether enrollees in the health care program may purchase subsidies through the federal exchange—or just using state-run exchanges.
The health care law currently says these tax credits are only available under exchanges “established by the state.”
If the Supreme Court decides against the government, the 34 states that did not set up exchanges could lose federal health care subsidies, striking a blow to a foundational piece of the law.
“We are not going to go backwards,” Obama said, referencing the presidents before him who worked toward universal health care. “There’s something deeply cynical about the ceaseless, endless partisan attempts to roll back progress.”
But critics of the Affordable Care Act do not view the law as progress.
“Progress would be to roll back the costly insurance regulations and mandates imposed by Obamacare that are driving up, not down, the cost of coverage for millions of Americans—those with and without access to subsidies,” said Nina Owcharenko, The Heritage Foundation’s director of the Center for Health Policy Studies.
Throughout his speech, the president wove religious allusions with statistics touting the law’s successes, stressing a moral duty of Americans to make the “right” to universal health care a continued “reality.”
“America is not a place where we simply ignore the poor or turn away from the sick,” he said. “It’s a place sustained by the idea that I am my brother’s keeper and I am my sister’s keeper. That we have an obligation to put ourselves in our neighbor’s shoes, and to see the common humanity in each other.”
Obama admitted the law “isn’t perfect,” pointing to its shaky rollout and flawed delivery system, but pressed on with anecdotal stories of success.
Obama said these stories, rather than political motivations, pushed him to restore “a basic promise to America” by providing universal health care.
“We have to protect the coverage that people have now and sign even more people up,” he said. “We need more governors and state legislatures to expand Medicaid. We have to continue to improve the quality of the care.”
