Obama pitches healthcare in Maine

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In the latest effort to sell his policies, President Obama again took to the road on Thursday, telling an audience in Maine that the passage of the healthcare insurance overhaul showed his administration’s commitment to helping small businesses and the struggling middle class.

With polls showing that healthcare remains a divisive issue in this midterm election year, Obama argued that the overhaul was part of a package of changes needed to help the middle class work its way out of a devastating recession.

“I want you to know that we are working every day to spur job creation and turn this economy around,” Obama told the cheering crowd. “That’s why we worked so hard over the last year to lift one of the biggest burdens facing middle-class families and small-business owners, the crushing cost of healthcare in America.

“Last week, after a year of debate and a century of trying, health insurance reform became the law of the land,” Obama said. “It happened because of you.”

“Yes we did, yes we did,” the crowd shouted back.

Last month, Obama signed the healthcare measure into law, capping more than year of partisan fighting. No Republican voted for the final passage in either of the congressional chambers, and the GOP has vowed to make healthcare a centerpiece of its campaign to recapture control of Congress.

As an example of the continuing split over the healthcare law, one protester carried a sign with a picture of the president and the words, ‘Dump Socialism.’’

Thursday’s trip was Obama’s second outside the Beltway to convince Americans that the healthcare law was needed and should be supported. Last week, he traveled to Iowa, making many of the same arguments he repeated in Portland, Maine.

“What this reform represents is basically a middle-of-the-road solution to a very serious problem,” Obama said. “It’s not the single-payer, some people wanted that, I understood that. It’s not that.

“But it is also not what Republicans were advocating for,” which Obama described as a deregulation of the insurance industry. ‘You let them run wild and somehow you were going to benefit. It was called the foxes guarding the chicken coop healthcare plan.

“This reform incorporates ideas from both Democrats and Republicans – including, by the way, from your senator and my friend, Olympia Snowe, who spent many hours meeting with me about this bill,” Obama said.

Democrats had hoped to woo Maine’s two GOP senators, generally seen as less conservative than their colleagues, but failed to sway either Snowe or Sen. Susan Collins. Both senators rejected an invitation to appear with the president, White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters on Air Force One, en route to New England.

Obama said that it would take four years for the overhaul to be fully implemented but that the consumer enhancements would kick in quickly. Those include ending insurance company practices of using preexisting conditions as an excuse to curb benefits and lifting annual caps on payments. He also mentioned the help seniors will receive to buy medications, filling Medicare’s so-called doughnut hole in drug benefits.

On this trip, the president also stressed the advantages for small-business owners. Businesses that have 25 or fewer employees will receive tax credits this year if they provide health insurance. Those credits increase by 2014, with 4 million small businesses benefiting, according to the White House.

In 2014, companies with up to 100 employees will be able to buy insurance through the newly created exchanges. The idea is to give small businesses the same purchasing power that larger ones enjoy.

“Starting this year, millions of small-business owners will be eligible for a tax credit that will help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees,” Obama said, citing owners like Bill Milliken, who has two companies in Portland, Market House Coffee and the Maine Beer and Beverage Corp.

Obama asked Milliken to stand to cheers. “In exchange for this publicity, I hope I’m going to get some samples of the beer,” Obama joked. “He nodded in the affirmative.”

“He wants to give his part-time employees health insurance and more hours, but he can’t afford to do both,” Obama said. “This tax credit will make it easier for an employer like Bill who wants to do the right thing by his workers.”

As he has throughout the healthcare battles, Obama noted the political dimensions and GOP hostility to Democratic efforts.

“There has been plenty of fear-mongering, lot of overheated rhetoric,” Obama said. “If you turn on the news, you’ll see that those same folks who were hollering about it before it passed are still hollering about how the world will end because we passed this bill. This is not an exaggeration. [House Minority Leader] John Boehner called the passage of this bill ‘Armageddon.’

“We don’t need to boo,” Obama replied as the crowd made its displeasure known. “Yet others have said this is the end of freedom as we know it.

“So after I signed the bill, I looked around,” the president said to cheers and laughter. “I looked up to the sky to see if asteroids were coming. I looked to the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth. You know what? It turned out to be a pretty nice day. Birds were still chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody lost their doctor. Nobody had pulled the plug on Granny. Nobody was being forced into some government plan,” Obama said.

Nor did Obama spare the media, an increasingly available target for a White House upset with what it has called the Washington echo chamber and the pressures that build up because of the 24-hour news cycle.

“You have to love some of the pundits in Washington. Every single day since I signed the reform law, there’s been another poll or headline that says ‘Nation still divided on health reform. Polls haven’t changed yet’,” Obama said.

“Well, yeah. It’s just happened last week. It’s only been a week,” he said.

“Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm,” Obama said. “You planted some seeds and they came out the next day and they looked, ‘Nothing’s happened! There’s no crop, we’re going to starve, oh, no!’,” Obama said. “It’s a disaster.

“It’s been a week folks,” Obama said. “Before we find out if people like healthcare reform, maybe we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.”

--Peter Nicholas, reporting from Maine

--Michael Muskal, reporting from Los Angeles.