Some of the highest-profile challenges are the White House’s own making. White House plays defense on Obamacare

President Barack Obama’s soundbites are coming back to bite him.

As he attempted to sell a complex health care reform plan to skeptical voters during the 2008 campaign and his first year in office, Obama boiled down the benefits to a series of pithy promises:


If you like your existing insurance, you can keep it. Shopping for a plan would be as easy as buying a plane ticket on Expedia. Annual premiums would drop by $2,500 for the typical family.

The simplicity of those messages are now running up against the reality of implementing the most far-reaching health care overhaul in 50 years.

( POLITICO's guide to the Affordable Care Act)

For every positive statistic about the law, there’s a horror story that calls into question the broad promises of Obamacare and gives Republicans something else to criticize. It’s forced the White House into yet another frustrating round of Whac-A-Mole, beating back one negative development only to find several more right behind it.

The latest controversy about the upheaval in the individual market shows that — long after problems with HealthCare.gov are fixed — there will still be an endless stream of bad-news anecdotes to compete with the administration’s charts, figures and feel-good tales about how the law is working for millions of Americans.

“The Obama administration has certainly tried to remind people of the long-term policy goals and to take the long view,” said Sabrina Corlette, project director at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University. “But in this environment and 24-7 news cycle, it is really hard not to get caught up in the anecdote of the day.”

Some of the highest-profile challenges are the White House’s own making. Obama made sweeping generalizations that can be contradicted by individual experiences. Not everybody will see the deep savings that he promised during the 2008 campaign. A large percentage of people who buy their own insurance won’t be able to keep the exact same policy. The website hasn’t been nearly as breezy as predicted.

( WATCH: Obamacare timeline)

The latest headache for the administration is the release late Tuesday of a report showing that a major contractor had warned of website problems weeks before HealthCare.gov’s launch. The document drop came from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

The Democratic strategy, for now, is to offer up stats and stories that push back on the negative claims.

The House hearing Tuesday with Marilyn Tavenner, who runs the agency implementing the law, was a tussle between good and bad. Republicans focused on policy cancellations and price hikes, while Democrats emphasized the big picture: 17 million Americans with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied coverage; 6.6 million young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance plans; 7.7 million seniors have saved more than $8.3 billion on prescription drugs.

White House press secretary Jay Carney tried the same approach at his daily briefing, pointing out that only the 5 percent of Americans who buy insurance on the individual market are receiving letters from insurers warning of policy changes and premium hikes.

( PHOTOS: 10 Sebelius quotes about the Obamacare website)

“I understand that there’s a lot of attention being focused on it and that it deserves fuller explanation — and I think fuller explanation by us and fuller explanation by everybody reporting on it, so that viewers and readers and listeners are getting the full picture about this issue,” Carney said of the latest controversy sparked Monday by an NBC News story.

Carney tried to provide context. People who buy their own insurance sign 12-month contracts, so the renewal process under way is a longstanding practice in the industry. Insurers would use the renewal period to change coverage and raise premiums regardless of Obamacare. The difference this year is that insurers will now be required under Obamacare to provide a minimum package of benefits that consumers probably weren’t receiving before. That means premiums will be higher, but the tradeoff is better coverage, greater security and tax subsidies for many Americans to offset the costs, he said.

“The fact is that millions of Americans who have been subject to the whims and vagaries of this individual insurance market are going to have security that they’ve never had before, and better coverage, in most cases, than they’ve ever had before, and cheaper coverage, in many cases, than they’ve ever had before,” Carney said.

The White House’s PR challenge is that 5 percent of the population — 15 million — is still a huge number of people potentially experiencing changes that Obama promised they wouldn’t face.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that Obama and Democrats could have been more “precise” in their messaging that the Affordable Care Act would not push Americans out of their existing health care plans.

“I don’t think the message was wrong,” Hoyer said at his weekly briefing with reporters. “I think the message was accurate, but … clearly it should have been caveated with, ‘assuming you have a policy that does in fact do what the bill is designed to do.’

“We used [the message] trying to allay the fears of people with group policies and those with significant coverage through their employer, which was the overwhelming number,” Hoyer continued. “You could have caveated, ‘unless you have coverage that’s insufficient to accomplish the objectives of giving you quality health care.’”

The Congressional Budget Office foreshadowed the upheaval in the individual market in a November 2009 report released weeks before the Senate passed the bill.

It found that by 2016 the cost of individual policies would be 10 percent to 13 percent higher than the average premium for nongroup coverage under current law. But the compromise was that people would get more for their money, and individuals who qualify for tax subsidies could see their premiums drop by as much as 60 percent, the study concluded.

Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who requested the CBO study, said in an interview Tuesday that the premium increases weren’t unexpected. But he said he didn’t expect to hear stories of people being phased out of their existing coverage. The “grandfather clause” written into the law should have protected them, he said.

The clause stipulated that plans in existence before the law passed wouldn’t be subject to its many requirements for basic coverage. The administration later issued a regulation stating that plans would lose the exemption if they were changed for the worse, such as higher co-pays or deductibles.

“That issue was never highlighted at the time,” Bayh said. “Most people would have been assumed and favored a more generous interpretation of the grandfather clause because we would have wanted more people to stay with their existing policy.”

On Wednesday, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) grilled Tavenner at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing on this point. He highlighted a constituent who learned that she would lose her current plan and be forced to consider a more expensive alternative.

“She has health insurance that she likes,” Schock said. “She’s been paying her premium. She wants to keep it. But she can’t. Isn’t that a lie?”

Tavenner’s response was an emotionless read of how the industry operates.

“There has always been the issue where issuers have the ability to stop offering a policy,” she said.

Bruno Gora, a 61-year-old from Richmond, Va., learned recently that he couldn’t keep his current plan. He told his senators, Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, and his representative in the House, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican.

“He is self-employed, and he received this cancellation letter from Anthem Blue Cross [and] Blue Shield,” Cantor said Tuesday. “He is a resident of Richmond and had insurance, and from the insurance company received notice that changes from health reform — otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act — continue to take effect in 2014 and to meet the requirements of the new law, the insurance company said, ‘your current plan can no longer be offered.’”

Gora said he was offered an option to renew his high deductible policy by December — before the Obamacare requirements kick in Jan. 1 — but at a cost of $1,200 more per year. Or he could buy a plan that meets the Obamacare requirements but costs $3,400 more per year, Gora said.

“By no means are they kicking me out in the cold,” he said in an interview.

Gora said he didn’t know whether he qualified for tax subsidies to lower his costs and that he wouldn’t check for a few days — not until he cleared away some orders in his graphic printing business.

But even if he did, Gora said he wouldn’t be happy about it.

“I haven’t taken that step yet, so I don’t know,” said Gora, who described himself as a Republican. “But I don’t know if I would qualify for any of the other bazillion programs either. It has just not been my makeup to do that. Do I qualify? Then, do I want to be that person?”

“It would tick me off,” he added. “I know I have to do that, but I haven’t agreed with myself to do that.”