With the Supreme Court set to issue its ruling in
King v. Burwell, the case that could strip Obamacare subsidies away from millions of people, President Obama
made a forceful moral case for the law, speaking before the Catholic Health Association on Health Care in America. Obama argued that now, five years after it finally passed, "what we are talking about is no longer just a law, it's no longer just a theory. It isn't even about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. This isn't about myths or rumors that folks try to sustain. […] There is a reality that people on the ground day to day are experiencing."
"The rugged individualism that defines America has always been bound by a shared set of values, an enduring sense that we're in this together, that America is not a place where we simply turn away from the sick, or turn our backs on the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. It is a place sustained by the idea: I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper—that we have an obligation to put ourselves in our neighbor's shoes and see each other's common humanity.
"And so, after a century of talk, after decades of trying, after a year of sustained debate, we finally made health care reform a reality here in America.
"And despite the constant doom-and-gloom predictions, the unending Chicken Little warnings that somehow making health insurance fairer and easier to buy would lead to the end of freedom, the end of the American way of life—lo and behold, it did not happen. None of this came to pass. In fact, in a lot of ways, the Affordable Care Act worked out better than some of us anticipated."
He talked about the numbers—the lowest uninsured rate ever, the slowest rate of growth in healthcare costs in 50 years, the additional 13 years of actuarial life in Medicare thanks to saving. But he also talked about people's lives, and particularly about Debra Lea Oren of Palmer, Pennsylvania, who
wrote to him describing how she has regained the use of her legs thanks to the surgery she could get because she finally has health insurance through Obamacare. That, the president argues, is why we have Obamacare. He didn't say it explicitly, but it's also what's now in the Supreme Court's hands.
Obama was once again going over the heads of the Republican Congress to the people, making the case for why "now it's up to all of us—the citizens in this room and across the country—to continue to help make the right to health care a reality for all Americans." He's putting Republicans on notice that if the Supreme Court does its worst, not fixing this is not going to be an option.