Reform Update: Obama touts reform law's benefits for women

Just ahead of Mother's Day, President Barack Obama on Friday spoke from the White House about the ways his signature healthcare law will help millions of American women and their families.

“In a country as wealthy as this one, there was no reason why a family's security should be determined by the chance of an illness or an accident,” said the president, flanked by women who had written to him about how the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has affected them. “We decided to do something about it.”

The president told a few stories about the women who appeared with him at the event, including Carol Metcalf, who introduced him. Metcalf was there with her grown son, Justin, who she said has a rare disease and is also a traumatic brain injury survivor. Metcalf said “a huge worry was lifted” when the Affordable Care Act allowed her son to stay on her family insurance plan.

Obama ticked off a list of the law's accomplishments and said there is more work to do in the coming months to make sure that more Americans can buy affordable coverage. He also reiterated an earlier message he gave last week when he said that about 85% of Americans who have insurance are already benefitting from the law's provisions, while the tens of millions without insurance will be able to compare prices and shop from an array of plans when open enrollment begins this October. He also said there will be hiccups and mistakes—as well as misinformation about the law until the next Election Day—as implementation continues.

“I am 110% committed to getting it done right,” the president said. “It's not an easy undertaking. But if it were easy, it would have been done a long time ago.”

The president's remarks also serve as an unofficial kickoff to the administration's public education and outreach efforts that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner have said will start this summer. That topic came up on a conference call with reporters May 9, when Sebelius, Health Resources and Services Administration Administrator Mary Wakefield and Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, announced about $150 million in available Affordable Care Act funding to help community health centers provide in-person enrollment assistance to consumers about the insurance exchanges, qualified health plans, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Wakefield clarified that this money was set aside in the Affordable Care Act specifically for health centers and did not come from the law's Prevention and Public Health Fund, where the administration has pulled money to use for education and outreach.

“Right now we have about 4,000 outreach workers across community health centers,” Wakefield said.

“Now we're helping them to expand. We hope to nearly double the number of outreach workers. That will become clearer to us as the applications come in,” she continued. “The health centers will submit applications and will give numbers about the people they are hiring for outreach and enrollment.”

Munoz referred to the nation's community health centers as “trusted institutions with a real presence in neighborhoods” that will be “key partners” helping the administration with its goal of teaching Americans about enrolling in insurance coverage.

At deadline, an HHS spokeswoman had not responded to a question about the total amount that the White House expects to spend on marketing efforts for the law.

House Republicans are gearing up for a vote next week to once again fully repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In the 112th Congress the House voted to overturn the Affordable Care Act in 2011 and 2012, and this latest vote offers new House members in the 113th Congress a chance to show their home districts where they stand on the law. The lower chamber has voted on more than 30 bills that seek to dismantle the law, either in full or in part.

Similar to those earlier votes, the move is a symbolic one and has no chance of passing in the Democratic-controlled Senate. “We want to provide freshman and all other members an opportunity to have their voices heard on Obamacare as its implementation kicks in and the American public sees healthcare costs rise, quality of care reduced and people getting kicked off their preferred plan,” Megan Whittemore, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said in an e-mail. “Surely, if the Democrats still support this law, they'll relish the opportunity to put their names behind it, again.”

The top Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress underscored their long-standing disapproval of the health reform law's Independent Payment Advisory Board this week when they refused a March request from the White House to submit names for consideration on the 15-member panel. In a letter to Obama (PDF), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said they believe Congress should repeal IPAB—and the rest of the seminal 2010 law with it. “Because the law will give IPAB's 15 unelected, unaccountable individuals the ability to deny seniors access to innovative care, we respectfully decline to recommend appointments,” the leaders wrote.

The American Hospital Association threw its support behind legislation that Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) introduced this week to stave off the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid and Medicare disproportionate-share hospital funding cuts for two years. AHA Executive Vice President Richard Pollack (PDF) said in a statement that the reductions were based on the notion that many of the uninsured and underinsured populations would receive coverage under the law. But the Supreme Court's decision that the federal government can't force states to expand Medicaid has had a negative effect on those projections, he continued. “This will allow for coverage expansions to be more fully realized,” Pollack said of the bill, the DSH Reduction Relief Act of 2013.

Follow Jessica Zigmond on Twitter: @MHjzigmond