Obama: Critics 'grossly misleading'

President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended his health care law from “grossly misleading” critics challenging his claim that Americans who liked their insurance could keep it and from persistent problems with HealthCare.gov.

“For the vast majority of people who have health insurance that works, you can keep it,” Obama said Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where former Gov. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy came together in 2006 as Romney signed Massachusetts’s health care law.


“For the fewer than five percent of Americans who buy insurance on your own, you will be getting a better deal. So anybody peddling the notion that insurers are canceling peoples’ plans without mentioning that almost all the insurers are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections … you’re being grossly misleading. To say the least.”

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA)

Obama’s comments came as he tried to explain why his years of claims that Americans who liked their health insurance plans would be able to keep them once the Affordable Care Act were not inaccurate. Over the course of more than five minutes, he laid out the fact that a small percentage of Americans with insurance policies through the individual market are being notified by their insurers that their plans are being cancelled because of the law’s new standards but that that is ultimately good for those people.

While struggling to explain why he hadn’t misled in saying that Americans who liked their plans could keep them, Obama played defense on a second front, voicing continued frustration with HealthCare.gov.

“The web site is too slow, too many people have gotten stuck and I’m not happy about it,” he said. “There is no excuse for it. And I take full responsibility for making sure it gets fixed ASAP.”

While he acknowledged that there were legitimate problems with the law and its implementation, Obama lashed out at critics looking for anything to complain about.

( PHOTOS: Sebelius testifies on Obamacare rollout)

“It’s no surprise that some of the same folks trying to scare people now are the same folks who have been trying to sink the Affordable Care Act from the beginning,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t understand it. Providing people with health care should be a no-brainer. Giving people a chance to get health care should be a no-brainer.”

Obama traveled to Boston for evening fundraisers, but also to draw parallels between the ACA and Massachusetts’s health care law, which wasn’t “perfect right away,” as he put it. Just 123 people signed up for coverage during the state’s first month of open enrollment but, over the course of several months, signups accelerated and kinks were worked out of the system.

Still, “Democrats and Republicans came together to make health reform a reality for the people of Massachusetts,” he said, by connecting “the progressive vission of health care for all with some ideas of markets and competition that had long been championed by conservatives. And … it worked.”

( PHOTOS: 10 Sebelius quotes about Obamacare website)

The ACA was, he said, built on “this template of proven, bipartisan success,” which means it will take time and tweaks for the law to work smoothly.

Though Romney’s name was invoked several times over the course of the president’s speech, the former Republican presidential candidate wasn’t invited to the speech, principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. Still, he said, Romney “should be proud” of the law he signed.

In a statement Wednesday morning, Romney said that he still favors his state-based health care law over federal legislation.

“In the years since the Massachusetts health care law went into effect nothing has changed my view that a plan crafted to fit the unique circumstances of a single state should not be grafted onto the entire country,” Romney said. “Beyond that, had President Obama actually learned the lessons of Massachusetts health care, millions of Americans would not lose the insurance they were promised they could keep, millions more would not see their premiums skyrocket, and the installation of the program would not have been a frustrating embarrassment.”

( PHOTOS: House hearing on Obamacare website)

While Romney wasn’t on stage Wednesday, successor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, was. “Health care reform is working for the people of Massachusetts and it will work for the people of America,” Patrick said as he warmed up the crowd for Obama.

Responding to Obama’s defense of his promise that Americans who liked their plans could keep them, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that, “despite the evidence, the president continues to mislead the American people about his health care law.”

“The president promised that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it. It wasn’t true when he said it years ago, and, as millions of Americans are finding out, it’s not true now,” Boehner said in a statement. “Millions are being forced to buy new, Washington-approved plans, regardless of whether they liked their old plan or not and often at a higher cost. The president sold this law on a pack of lofty promises. But what he said simply wasn’t true. The American people deserve better.”