President Obama makes the case for young people signing up for Obamacare
In Florida on Thursday, President Obama took some time out from stumping for Democrats to stump for something else that's pretty important: Obamacare. He was particularly appealing to young people, who are disproportionately uninsured, and who could help stabilize the exchange markets with their participation.
Less than two weeks before the Nov. 1 start of the enrollment period for Affordable Care Act health plans, Obama flew to a south Florida college to kick off a push by the administration to encourage more people to sign up, with a particular emphasis on young adults. […]Obama presented his own prescription to make the law better, including getting Florida and more than a dozen states that haven't yet done so to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid and bring health insurance to millions more people.
He also called for providing tax credits to help middle-class Americans and young adults afford coverage, creating a "public plan fallback" to provide more options, particularly for people in rural and other hard to reach areas, and encouraging state innovation.
Obama compared problems in the law to a bug in new technology. He said, for example, that a company will fix a problem with a smartphone.
"They upgrade it, unless it catches fire and then they just pull it off the market," Obama joked, in a reference to the recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. "But you don't go back to using a rotary phone. You don't say, we're repealing smartphones."
In a normal world, the problems with Obamacare would have been tweaked by a Congress that cared about its citizenry. In a normal world, Republicans would care as much about the health and welfare of the public as Democrats. We're not in a normal world. But a Democratic congress working with a Democratic president committed to making this law better? Just one more thing on the line in 2016.
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