On Tuesday, President Barack Obama blamed Republicans for the Obamacare mess that made him concede he would have to “rebrand” and “remarket” Obamacare, ignoring that the law was passed with legislative gimmicks and no Republican support in the House.
At the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Obama said he should have better anticipated that the GOP’s opposition to the individual mandate and “would create a rockier rollout than if Democrats and Republicans were both invested in success.”
“One of the problems that we’ve had is that one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure and that makes the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine-tuning the law more challenging,” Obama said.
He claimed implementing Obamacare was already going to be hard even without “a very difficult political environment” and said there was “a price to that.”
Obama then said his administration was “fending off efforts to undermine” the law, which he claimed was making the Obamacare rollout more difficult. He did not mention that he had promised Americans that they would be able to keep their insurance plans under Obamacare when pushing the law. After millions of Americans received cancellation notices, Obama apologized and last week announced an administrative “fix” to give insurance companies the option of giving Americans back their cancelled plans for a year.
Obama made his remarks as a national poll found that two-thirds of Americans oppose the individual mandate.
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