Obama Care is a disaster

Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Well, thank you, Maryland_Kid. And thanks to everybody here for coming on this beautiful day. "some companies, especially small businesses, can't pay for all of their full time workers to have a certain amount of care so they have to fire full time workers and hire a lot of part time workers." Because you’re a small businessperson and you have to go out on the individual market and buy it on your own and it’s just too expensive -- October 1st was an important date. That’s when we opened the new marketplaces where people without health insurance, or who can’t afford health insurance, or who aren’t part of a group plan, can finally start getting affordable coverage. "Third, the website for using Obama Care failed." Of course, you’ve probably heard that HealthCare.gov –- the new website where people can apply for health insurance, and browse and buy affordable plans in most states –- hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work. And the number of people who have visited the site has been overwhelming, which has aggravated some of these underlying problems. Despite all that, thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak. Many Americans with a preexisting condition are discovering that they can finally get health insurance like everybody else. I want to tell you what we’re doing to make it work better and how you can sign up to get covered in other ways. But before I do that, let me remind everybody that the Affordable Care Act is not just a website. It's much more. For the vast majority of Americans -- for 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance through your employer or Medicare or Medicaid -– you don’t need to sign up for coverage through a website at all. You've already got coverage. What the Affordable Care Act does for you is to provide you with new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time. You may not know it, but you're already benefiting from these provisions in the law. Another part of the Affordable Care Act is providing seniors with deeper discounts on their prescription medicine. Billions of dollars have been saved by seniors already. That’s part of the law. It’s already in place. It’s happening right now. "Fourth, the bill is so large that not many people read the whole thing in Congress." The way we’ve set it up, there are no more absurdly long application forms. There’s no medical history questionnaire that goes on for pages and pages. "Fifth, the people that run the IRS, the public schools, the post office, and the Federal Government run the health care system. A lot of those programs are into a lot of debt, have no competition or accountability and have too much power to run our lives." "Sixth, it adds to our debt." Tax breaks have not been paid for by reductions in Federal spending, and thus the only way to pay for them has been to increase our deficit to historically high levels and borrow more and more money. "Seventh, there is a doctor shortage with the increase in demand coming." You like your doctor, you like your plan — you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you. "Eighth, some people couldn't keep their health care plan unlike what Obama promised." I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me. We've got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this. "Ninth, Obama Care implementation has terrible effects on the economy." I recognize that the Republican Party has made blocking the Affordable Care Act its signature policy idea. In fact, they were willing to shut down the government and potentially harm the global economy to try to get it repealed. "Whatever the solution for health care is, it's not what we have currently with the Affordable Care Act." I’ve said many times -- I’m willing to work with anyone on any idea to make this law perform even better.