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| FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2013 file photo, former President Bill Clinton speaks in Charlottesville, Va. Adding pressure to fix the administration's problem-plagued health care program, Clinton says President Barack Obama should find a way to let people keep their health coverage, even if it means changing the law. Clinton says Obama should "honor the commitment that the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got." |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Adding pressure to fix the administration's problem-plagued
health care program, former President Bill Clinton says President Barack
Obama should find a way to let people keep their health coverage, even
if it means changing the law.
Clinton says
Obama should "honor the commitment that the federal government made to
those people and let them keep what they got."
The
former president, a Democrat who has helped Obama promote the
3-year-old health law, becomes the latest in Obama's party to urge the
president to live up to a promise he made repeatedly, declaring that the
if Americans liked their health care coverage, they would be able to
keep it under the new law.
Instead, millions
of Americans have started receiving insurance cancellation letters.
That, coupled with the troubled launch of the health care law's
enrollment website, has prompted Republican critics and frustrated
Democrats to seek corrections in the law.
House
Republicans have drafted legislation to give consumers the opportunity
to keep their coverage. Ten Senate Democrats are pushing for an
unspecified extension of the sign-up period and in a private White House
meeting last week several pressed Obama to do so. Sen. Mary Landrieu,
D-La., has proposed legislation that would require insurance companies
to reinstate the canceled policies.
The White
House says it is working on changes that would ease the impact of the
cancellations for some people. But the fixes under consideration are
administrative actions, not congressional changes to the law.
White
House spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday reiterated the White House
argument that the cancellations apply to only about 5 percent of
Americans who obtained health care insurance. He also argued that more
than half of those people receiving termination notices would benefit
from better insurance at lower prices either through expanded Medicaid
or through new health care marketplaces.
For the remainder, Carney said, "The president has instructed his team to look at a range of options."
The
issue facing the administration now is how to ease the impact on people
who are losing their plans and don't qualify for subsidies to cover
higher premiums. Carney said the White House opposes a House Republican
bill, proposed by Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., that would allow insurers to
keep selling insurance that doesn't offer the type of benefits required
by the new law.
"Any fix that would
essentially open up for insurers the ability to sell new plans that do
not meet standards would create more problems than it fixed," he said.
Jonathan
Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who advised
the Obama administration on the health care law, said the White House
has few if any administrative options available.
One
solution, he said, would be to offer a "transitional tax credit" to
those consumers who are losing their insurance and must pay more for new
coverage that meets the law's standards.
"I don't know how you do that without Congress's permission, and they're not going to give it to you," he said.
Sen.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second ranking Democratic leader in the
Senate, on Tuesday said that while the law does face problems, he said
some of the changes proposed by Republicans "are not friendly proposals.
They're designed to derail this effort."
In
an interview with CNN, Durbin cautioned that if consumers are permitted
to keep policies that don't meet the law's minimum requirements "it's
going to be difficult for the insurance industry to produce a product
that really is going to serve our needs and that they can adequately
tell us what it costs."
Asked whether Obama
lied to the public when he promised people that they could keep their
policies, Durbin said: "A couple more sentences added would clarify it."
In his interview with the website http://www.OZY.com
, Clinton overall praised the health care legislation. "The big lesson
is that we're better off with this law than without it."
Carney noted that Clinton's own efforts to pass health care legislation during his presidency were blocked.
"The
goal here is to achieve what President Clinton and presidents both
Democratic and Republican sought to achieve in the past," he said.
