Obamacare’s Kindest Critic - The New York Times

"History will almost surely rank health care reform as one of President Obama’s greatest accomplishments. About 20 million Americans have insurance that might otherwise have been unaffordable, and the law has cost much less than anticipated. But one senior administration official thinks the Affordable Care Act has fallen short. His name: Barack Obama.



Presidents usually wait until their memoirs to review their work. Not, in this case, Mr. Obama, who recently marked the act’s sixth anniversary with an unusual article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Health care costs are still much too high, he wrote, and 29 million people still lack coverage. He then sketched some ideas for the presumptive presidential nominees. Hillary Clinton is likely to listen, having proposed improvements of her own. Donald Trump, not so much. He has so far adopted the “repeal and replace” position of his party.



Six years ago, 16 percent of Americans did not have health insurance; that number is now down to 9.1 percent. People forced to pay out of their own pocket were often bankrupted. Some went without care, and others resorted to charity care at emergency rooms. The law has helped many of these people by expanding Medicaid, which insures the poor. For millions of others, it created health care exchanges where people could buy coverage with the help of government subsidies."



Obamacare’s Kindest Critic - The New York Times