Although President Obama has essentially been called a liar by his critics for admitting that his oft-stated comment that the Affordable Care Act would allow Americans to keep their health care plan if they liked it, he's certainly not the only Democrat who made that statement in the past few years.
In a press release issued out after the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the ACA back in July 2009, the Tampa-based U.S. Representative Kathy Castor said, "“Nothing in this bill will force you to drop your current coverage. Rest assured, if you like your health insurance, you can keep it."
As everyone now knows, millions of Americans who purchased their policies on the private market have had their coverage discontinued because they don't meet the requirements of the ACA for more comprehensive care. Although some Democrats stand by the comment that people are losing their plans because those plans — the so-called junk plans — merely provide bare bones coverage, the fact is that they are still losing their plans because of the law.
Castor is confident that the legislation will ultimately become a success, but admits that its grand opening has been poorly managed.
[jump]"I'm livid that the website didn’t work right off the bat," she told CL on Friday afternoon after holding a press availability inside the central warehouse for Feeding America Tampa Bay, the region's largest food bank. "And I’ve expressed my displeasure directly to President Obama and directly to (Health & Human) Secretary Sebelius because we have so many people in this community and all across America who were very interested and desperate in some cases for getting affordable care."
Problems with HealthCare.gov came to the fore months before the October 1 launch, according to a detailed story in Saturday's New York Times. The story reports:
Vital components were never secured, including sufficient access to a data center to prevent the website from crashing. A backup system that could go live if it did crash was not created, a weakness the administration has never disclosed. And the architecture of the system that interacts with the data center where information is stored is so poorly configured that it must be redesigned, a process that experts said typically takes months. An initial assessment identified more than 600 hardware and software defects —“the longest list anybody had ever seen,” one person involved with the project said.
Congresswoman Castor recited a number of benefits of the new legislation on Friday, and says the real outrage in Florida remains the fact that the state Legislature refused to support accepting the federal government's offer to expand Medicaid services, despite Republican Governor Rick Scott's admission earlier this year that he personally supports the idea.
"Some of the complaining that I hear is partisan from Republicans, " Castor said. "I have to say let’s hold up a mirror and have you explain why almost one million of our neighbors across Florida will be denied their own tax dollars working for them under Medicaid in the state?"
There was a plan conceived by state Senator Joe Negron (R-Palm City) that would expand Medicaid using private insurers, a plan he called “Healthy Florida.” But if failed to gain any traction in the state House.
The Guardian reported on Thursday that "secret conversations" have been taking place between the Florida Legislature and healthcare officials that would "most likely" lead state lawmakers to accept the Medicaid money. But the only officials quoted in the story were University of Miami President Donna Shalala and Florida Blue president and CEO Patrick Geraghty, who both said it made sense for the GOP to accept the funding. But no actual lawmakers were quoted, and on Thursday House Democratic Leader Perry Thurston issued a statement saying that aside from the Guardian story, "I am not aware of new conversations between healthcare stakeholders and legislative leaders about Florida accepting available federal dollars to provide affordable, quality health coverage to Floridians."
Castor also weighed in on the controversial move by U.S. Senate Democrats to utilize the so-called nuclear option, narrowly passed a change to the required vote for clearing procedural hurdles to confirm judges and executive nominees from 60 to a simple 51-vote majority. Senate Republicans are outraged at the move. But Castor says that Democrats were compelled to act because of their obstructionism. "The Republicans in the Senate went entirely too far," she maintains.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnestsays that there were 50 judicial vacancies when President Obama took office and there are 93 today. He says that many of those nominees have bipartisan support but simply can't get an up-or-down in the Senate.