President Obama’s top health official said late Monday she does not know how many people have enrolled in the federal online market tied to Obamacare, which has been plagued by technical glitches, but insisted the website is improving and the program will help people.
Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made her comments on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” a satirical news program that takes on the dynamics in Washington and elsewhere — even if it uses humor to get there.
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It also highlights the complexity that arises where public policy and politics meet.
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“Let me ask you this — am I a stupid man?” Mr. Stewart asked Mrs. Sebelius at one point, as he circled around an intricate aspect of the Affordable Care Act’s implementation.
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Mr. Stewart started the discussion by highlighting the slow Web traffic that has hampered the rollout of HealthCare.gov, a federal site that is supposed to allow consumers in more than 30 states sign up for health coverage, often with the help of income-based subsidies.
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The federal market and more than a dozen state-run markets debuted last Tuesday, but users have reported a frustrating experience.
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“We’re going to do a challenge, I’m gonna try and download every movie ever made,” Mr. Stewart said. “And you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.”
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But Mrs. Sebelius defended efforts to get the program up and running, saying “it’s better today than it was yesterday and will keep getting better.”
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She also defended President Obama’s overall goals, saying the health care law leverages competition in the private marketplace and ensures that Americans take responsibility for their health coverage — even if it is mandated and could cost more for some than others — because the country cannot keep picking up the tab for uninsured people who use the emergency room as their go-to doctor.
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She also pressed back against Mr. Stewart’s questions about the delay of an employer mandate requiring larger firms to provide coverage or pay fines, but not the individual mandate requiring all Americans to gain coverage.
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Americans can choose not to get coverage, she said, but they will face a fine.
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“The theory is they can’t pick and choose if they’re going to get hit by a bus or diagnosed with an illness,” Mrs. Sebelius said. “For a lot of young folks, they’re one fall on the basketball court, one auto accident away from a lifetime of hospital bills they can’t pay.”
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Republicans were not satisfied by that answer and circulated clips and quotes from the interview early Tuesday.
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“When even Daily Show host Jon Stewart begins to ask why big business has received an ObamaCare delay that isn’t being offered to individuals, you know the White House is on shaky ground,” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in a blog post.
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Mr. Stewart, exasperated by the political dynamics of the debate, suggested on Monday that it might have been easier to have a government-run, single-payer system to cut through all the complexity of health coverage.
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Mrs. Sebelius said Mr. Obama did not want to dismantle the employer-based insurance that 85 percent of the country already had, and there would be little appetite for a government-run system if a program that doles private coverage faces this kind of opposition.
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“As you know, we’re facing the end of Western civilization by having a market-based system,” she said.
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