Ezekiel Emanuel: ‘Narrative’ of People Losing Insurance ‘Died Away’ with Website Fixes
Former White House health care advisor and MSNBC contributor Ezekiel Emanuel joined MSNBC host Ed Schultz on Wednesday evening for an update on the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Emanuel told Schultz that, since the re-launch of the federal insurance exchange website following weeks of triage, the “narrative” of waves of insurance a cancelations has “died away.”
Schultz played a portion of a clip of former President Bill Clinton prior to interviewing Emanuel where Clinton told Fusion anchor Jorge Ramos that no one worked harder than he had to explain the ACA to the public. Schultz asked why Clinton would take credit for the ACA away from President Barack Obama at this critical juncture in his presidency.
“Actually, isn’t it interesting how the, sort of, that whole narrative about people losing their insurance has sort of died away as the website has come back and a million people or so a day can visit the website and see what’s available,” Emanuel said. “I do think a large part of the effort now has to be try to drive people to take a look at what’s on the website.”
“What President Clinton was talking about was junk insurance, but it doesn’t seem like anybody wants to use the term ‘junk insurance,’” Ed observed. “Why is that?”
“I mean, isn’t it time to kind of play hard ball with these people who are throwing around myths and misinformation that’s just been flying out everywhere?” the host continued. “I mean, a junk policy is a junk policy.”
“I think there is some short memory about how bad that individual market was and continues to be,” Emanuel agreed. “That’s actually a large part of the reason we did health reform, is because people who didn’t have health employer-based insurance often went to that market.”
Emanuel later clarified that the waves of policy cancellations was necessary in order to reform the individual market and eliminate discrimination against people with preexisting conditions.
Watch the clip below via MSNBC:
[Photo via screen grab ]
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