Knowing her audience, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius marshaled support for the healthcare reform law and told attendees at the annual Families USA conference they can expect more criticism of the law in the year ahead.
“I believe that over the next few months we'll see the biggest barrage of attacks and misinformation about the law that we've ever seen,” Sebelius said Thursday morning to the organization of healthcare consumers gathered in Washington. “And that's hard to do—increase the misinformation that's been circulating.” But she noted that opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have a tight window because as Americans learn about the law and its benefits, the more difficult it will be to talk about repeal.
The law's two-year anniversary in March and the U.S. Supreme Court decision later in the year will “put a new spotlight” on the Affordable Care Act, Sebelius said. Consequently, supporters of the law need to do two things if they want to maintain a stronger position. First, they need to do more to educate the American public about the law's benefits. Next, they must continue to ensure that those benefits reach people “by implementing the law as effectively as possible.”
“As the calls for repeal get louder in the months to come, we need to remember exactly what the status quo is that they want to return to,” Sebelius said, referring to the law's critics. “In the decade before the health law passed (2000-2010), we had a crumbling and disintegrating health insurance market. Tens of millions of Americans were locked out or priced out of the market. Premiums rose during that decade three times faster than wages,” she continued. “Employers, to deal with the situation, continued to shift more of that burden onto families or their employees or drop coverage altogether. And, at the same time, there was little improvement in our overall health even as health spending rose to more than a sixth of our economy by 2010. So we had a system in place that was bad for families, bad for business, and—as the president said over and over again—it was bad for our economy.”
The secretary took a shot at insurers when she noted that the healthcare system before 2010 was not bad for everyone, as the top five health insurance companies made a record profit of $12 billion a year before the law passed.
