Obama taunts GOP over Obamacare's success [View all]
President Obama declared victory on the five-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, saying the law has lived up to its promises, and he poked at Republicans for the doom and gloom predictions he says have failed to live up to the hype.
"The bottom line is this for the American people: the Affordable Care Act, this law, is saving money for families and for businesses. This law is also saving lives," the president said. "It's working, despite countless attempts to repeal, undermine, defund and defame this law...it's not the fiscal disaster critics warned about for five years."
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The president ticked off a list of statistics he says prove the law's success: a reduction in hospital admission rates and preventable patient deaths, insurance for 16 million Americans who did not have it before and a slowdown in the growth of healthcare spending.
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"We have been promised a lot of things these last five years that didn't turn out to be the case: death panels, doom, a serious alternative from Republicans in Congress," he said.
Mr. Obama says there are two reasons they can't find an alternative. First, "The Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it - based on conservative market based principles developed by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Republicans in congress and deployed by a guy named Mitt Romney in Massachusetts to great effect," he said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/five-years-in-obama-taunts-gop-obamcare-success/