The President Is Tired Of Fighting Over Obamacare

Barack Obama just doesn't understand. Why is anyone still trying to stop Obamacare?

With the Supreme Court yet again holding the fate of his signature law in its hands, the president defended the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday as the historic culmination of a 100-year-long struggle to deliver universal health care in the United States—and lamented the deep cynicism, as he called it, of those who still working to roll it back five years later.

It was another sales pitch, like others that Obama has given over the past few years to extol the law's successes and push back against persistent conservative criticism. But the specter of the Supreme Court gave it a renewed urgency.

He didn't specifically mention the King v. Burwell case, but it was easy to read between the lines. The Court is expected to rule any day now, and more than six million people could lose the law's financial subsidies if the justices rule they are illegal in the 30-plus states using the federalHealthCare.gov.

Speaking at the Catholic Health Association's annual meeting in Washington, Obama emphasized his amazement that the law's opponents continued to fight to thwart it after millions of people have been covered through the ACA and tens of millions more have benefited in other, subtler ways.

"The critics stubbornly ignore reality," Obama said. He leaned into the lectern, his hands draped over its front.

"Five years in, what we are talking about is no longer just a law. It's no longer just a theory. This isn't even just about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This isn't about myths or rumors that folks try to sustain," he said. "There is a reality that people on the ground, day to day, are experiencing. Their lives are better. This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America."

Obama described as "deeply cynical" the continued efforts, left unspecified, to backtrack on the progress that he praised: Millions of people covered, people with preexisting conditions protected from discrimination, health care costs slowed.

"We're not going to go backwards. There is something, I have to say, just deeply cynical about the ceaseless, endless, partisan attempts to roll back progress," he said. "I understood folks being skeptical or worried before the law passed and there wasn't a reality 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."

The speech came the day after the president more pointedly addressed the Supreme Court challenge. After suggesting that the Court should have never taken the case in the first place, Obama said that if the justices "play it straight," they will uphold the law's subsidies in the states that defaulted to the federal insurance exchange. The challengers argue that the ACA's wording prohibits the tax credits, which 87 percent of Obamacare enrollees receive, in those 30-plus states.

As he has many times before, Obama said Tuesday that the ACA's provisions were an answer to the question: "What kind of country do we want to be?"

"So after a century of talk, after decades of trying, after a year of sustained debate, we finally made health care reform a reality here in America," he said. "And despite the doom and gloom predictions, the unending Chicken Little warnings, that somehow making health care easier to buy would be the end of freedom, the end of the American way of life, lo and behold, it did not happen. None of this came to pass."

"More than five years ago, I said that while I was not the first president to take up this cause, I was determined to be the last," Obama said to conclude. "Now it's up to all of us … to continue to help make the right to health care a reality for all of us."

(Image via txking / Shutterstock.com )