His message, to Obamacare’s supporters and critics: Enough with the repeal votes. Obama embraces Obamacare

President Barack Obama left no doubt Tuesday night what his Obamacare sales technique will be: loud voice, lots of confidence and no apologies.

Don’t dwell on the scratches on the hood. Just tell the customer how good it will feel to rev the engine and drive the car off the lot.


Obamacare didn’t show up in the State of the Union address until over halfway through, and it encompassed all of nine paragraphs in an hour-plus stemwinder. But this was very much a hard sell by the president for Americans to sign up for his signature health care law, the biggest sales pitch Obama has made in a State of the Union address since the law passed. His pitch was a lengthy tour of all the success stories he could find: the Arizona woman with a health condition who got health coverage just in time, the Kentucky governor who built one of the best working enrollment websites in the country and the millions of Americans who have already signed up for coverage.

( Also on POLITICO: Full health care policy coverage)

His message to Obamacare’s supporters and critics: Enough with the repeal votes. Time to sign up — especially the young adults.

“That’s why, tonight, I ask every American who knows someone without health insurance to help them get covered by March 31st,” Obama said. “Moms, get on your kids to sign up. Kids, call your mom and walk her through the application. It will give her some peace of mind — plus, she’ll appreciate hearing from you.”

The one part Obama didn’t mention: that rocky rollout everyone heard so much about.

In Obama’s world on Tuesday night, there was no such thing as a broken federal website or canceled health insurance policies. It wasn’t even a call to sign up now that things are working better. It was as if Obamacare has been working well all along.

In fact, in Obama’s world, the only repairs that were needed were for the “broken health care system” that Obamacare was supposed to replace.

“In case you haven’t heard, we’re in the process of fixing that,” Obama said — as House Speaker John Boehner shot him a skeptical look.

( Full coverage of the 2014 State of the Union)

Obama declared that more than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage — a statement that was technically true but glossed over the uncertainty about whether all of those people really gained new health coverage because of the law.

That statement, however, made it easier for Obama to make his case against more votes to wipe the law off the books — as did his declaration to the country that, because of the law, “no American can ever again be dropped or denied coverage for a preexisting condition like asthma, back pain or cancer” and that “no woman can ever be charged more just because she’s a woman.”

Obama used his time to shine a powerful spotlight on Amanda Shelley, one of first lady Michelle Obama’s guests. Shelley is a physician assistant from Arizona with a pre-existing condition who got health insurance on Jan. 1 — and then had emergency abdominal surgery a few days later.

It was a success story that contained just about all the elements he needed: a sick person who was locked out of the health insurance system, got her coverage and then suddenly had a medical emergency that could have been financially devastating without insurance.

“That’s what health insurance reform is all about — the peace of mind that if misfortune strikes, you don’t have to lose everything,” Obama said.

“Now I don’t expect to convince my Republican friends on the merits of this law. But I know that the American people aren’t interested in refighting old battles,” Obama said. “So again, if you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, and increase choice — tell America what you’d do differently. Let’s see if the numbers add up.”

“But let’s not have another forty-something votes to repeal a law that’s already helping millions of Americans like Amanda. The first forty were plenty,” he said. “We all owe it to the American people to say what we’re for, not just what we’re against.”

Obama also gave a big shout-out to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat who has run one of the most successful Obamacare health insurance exchanges in the country — it had signed up 116,000 people as of the end of December — and just happens to be from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state. Obama described Beshear as “a man possessed when it comes to covering his commonwealth’s families.”

For the administration’s allies, Obama’s speech was a timely and badly needed sales pitch.

“Tonight President Obama called on every American to talk to the uninsured people in their lives — mother to child, neighbor to neighbor — about the importance of getting covered,” said Anne Filipic, president of Enroll America, a coalition of outside groups that has been working to sign people up. “We’ll continue to expand our campaign over the next two months to make sure as many people as possible can have the peace of mind that comes with quality, affordable health insurance.”

There’s no question that enrollment has been going better since the launch. Last week, the administration announced that 3 million people have signed up for private coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. That’s a huge leap over the 106,000 who had signed up in October, the first month of enrollment.

The catch, though, is that it’s not yet clear how many of those people were uninsured — and gained coverage for the first time — and how many were just replacing old insurance, such as policies that were canceled because they didn’t meet Obamacare standards. Some early reports suggest that a lot of them had coverage before.

There were probably some uninsured people among the 6 million Americans who have gained coverage under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program since October, but again, it’s not clear how many of those signups can be directly linked to Obamacare.

Right now, the most urgent task for Obama is to get as many healthy people into the mix as possible — which means signing up more young people.

Young adults age 18 to 34 are 40 percent of the market, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — but as of December, they were just 24 percent of the people who had signed up for Obamacare coverage. That’s enough to prevent the health plans from becoming seriously unstable, but it’s not enough to prevent the premiums from going up next year if they don’t get more healthy people to help pay for the sick people.

By contrast, older adults age 55 to 64 were overrepresented. They’re 17 percent of the market, but 33 percent of the people who had signed up for Obamacare as of December.

The experience of enrolling through the Obamacare health insurance exchanges is better than it was in October, but still very much a mixed bag.

HealthCare.gov, the federal enrollment website that serves 36 states and was pretty much unusable for most people in October, is working much more smoothly now — though the Obama administration is still building pieces that customers don’t deal with, like the part that pays insurers.

And states like Kentucky and California have had great successes with the websites they built themselves. But the websites of other states that are running their own exchanges, like Maryland and Oregon, have turned out to be embarrassing failures. And Minnesota’s website has so many technical problems that a consultant’s report said it could take two years to fix.

Republicans, naturally, swung the spotlight back to the health care law’s problems, especially people who have ended up paying more for their coverage.

No, we shouldn’t go back to the way things were, but this law is not working,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers said in the GOP response. “Republicans believe health care choices should be yours, not the government’s. And that whether you’re a boy with Down syndrome or a woman with breast cancer … you can find coverage and a doctor who will treat you.”

And Mike Lee of Utah, who gave the tea party response, called Obamacare “an inequality Godzilla that has robbed working families of their insurance, their doctors, their wages and their jobs.”