President Obama went into damage-control mode Thursday, confronting the backlash — some warranted, some cultivated by critics — over a section in the Affordable Care Act that has triggered a nationwide ruckus, making a show of regret for the fallout and offering a stopgap measure.
Acknowledging that he and other Obamacare architects had “fumbled the rollout on this health care law,” the president announced that Americans who were losing their individual health insurance policies because of the new law would have a year’s grace period to extend their coverage.
“I completely get how upsetting this can be for many Americans,” he added. “To those Americans I hear you loud and clear.”
Whether his acknowledgement and proposed fix will work to woo back a wary public remains to be seen — 52 percent of Americans are now hard-pressed to trust the president, according to the BBC’s Mark Mardell. This could spell trouble for Democrats on the 2014 campaign trail, an imminent probability that has no doubt occurred to House Speaker John Boehner, who intoned earlier Thursday that the Obamacare morass “is going to destroy the best health care delivery system in the world.”
A president resorting to rolling over and flashing underbelly is a reliable sign that no other options would suffice, and Obama’s opponents have clearly seized on this issue as their ticket to victory until at least 2016. Watch them pile on.
AP via The Hill:
–Posted by Kasia Anderson.