(CNN) — President Barack Obama has already apologized to Americans who lost their health plans under the Affordable Care Act. Now Bill Clinton is calling on his fellow Democrat to find a way to uphold an earlier vow that those who like their insurance plans can keep them.
“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got,” Clinton said during an interview with the website OZY.com.
Clinton did, however, spend much of the interview defending the 2010 health care overhaul.
“The big lesson is that we’re better off with this law than without it,” he said.
“The enrollment period didn’t come off well because the national website wasn’t ready,” Clinton noted. “But this happened once before. It happened when President Bush put in the Medicare drug program for seniors, which was not as complicated, but had exactly the same problem with the roll out. It was a disaster. There were people that lost their prescriptions for their existing medicine. And they fixed it.”
The House of Representatives is slated to vote later this week on a GOP-backed measure that would enact changes to Obamacare allowing insurance companies to continue offering individual plans that are currently being canceled because they don’t meet the Affordable Care Act’s standards for coverage.
When Obama apologized last week to people who were losing their health coverage “based on assurances they got from me,” he added that he was asking his advisers to look at ways in which the law could be altered.
“I’ve assigned my team to see what we can do to close some of the holes and gaps in the law, because, you know, my intention is to lift up and make sure the insurance that people buy is effective – that it’s actually going to deliver what they think they’re purchasing,” Obama said.
Officials later said those changes could include administrative fixes to the law.
