In his first major interview since a mid-term electoral drubbing, US President Barack Obama conceded he had taken a bigger political hit than expected for driving his signature health reforms through Congress.
“There’s a reason why our health care system hasn’t been reformed over the last several decades. Why every president talks about it and it never happens. Because it’s hard. It’s a huge, big complicated system,” Obama told CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“I made the decision to go ahead and do it and it proved as costly politically as we expected. Probably actually a little more costly than we expected, politically.”
The president was speaking after last Tuesday’s mid-elections saw the Republicans seize control of the House of Representatives and almost wipe out the Democratic majority in the Senate.
“I think the Republicans were able to paint my governing philosophy as a classic, traditional, big government liberal. And that’s not something that the American people want,” Obama said in an interview taped before he left for a 10-day tour of India.
The president in March signed into law historic, sweeping reforms that give health care access to almost every American and realize the dreams of generations of past US leaders.
The 940-billion-dollar overhaul will extend coverage to some 32 million Americans who currently have none, ensuring 95 percent of under-65 US citizens and legal residents will have health insurance.
But Republicans took control of the narrative and portrayed Obama as forcing a “Big Government” takeover of health care on an unwilling America, repeatedly asking why he hadn’t focused instead on sky-high US unemployment.
Obama refused to admit to the interviewer that he had been naive, but accepted he could have done more to convince the American public of the merits of his arguments, saying “we knew that it probably wasn’t great politics.
“I think that there are times where we said let’s just get it done, instead of worrying about how we’re getting it done. And I think that’s a problem. I’m paying a political price for that.”
Republicans have vowed to repeal Obama’s signature reforms, although realistically this will be impossible as the president still has the power to veto any such bid.
They may have more success in the courts as judges in several states have already said they will consider challenges over the constitutionality of the reforms, which mandate all Americans to have insurance or pay a fine.
“When you’re campaigning, I think you’re liberated to say things without thinking about, ‘Okay, how am I going to actually practically implement this,’ Obama told “60 Minutes.”
As if to confirm this, he then sounded far more conciliatory about working with the insurance companies than he had when he was portraying them as enemy number one on the campaign trail.
“When it comes to health care, we need to be consulting with the insurance industry, make sure they know how things are going to work,” he said.
Washington, Nov 7, 2010 (AFP)
