WASHINGTON — President Obama took his new health-care law into the heartland yesterday and dared Republicans to run campaigns this fall pledging to repeal it.
“Go for it,” the president taunted, insisting that the bill will become more popular with time.
“This is a common-sense bill,” Obama told the wildly supportive crowd gathered in a field house at the University of Iowa.
“It doesn’t do everything that everybody wants, but it moves us in the direction of universal health-care coverage in this country, and that’s why everybody here fought so hard for it,” he said.
Speaking in the state that has given him so many unlikely political victories in recent years, Obama touted his health-care plan as a way to rein in greedy insurance companies.
He promised the law will ease the burdens on small businesses and eventually lower health-care costs — a point disputed by Republicans and even Congress’s own accountants.
A new poll out yesterday showed Obama has gotten a slight bounce in approval since the bill passed.
Forty-five percent approve of Obama’s performance, according to the Quinnipiac University poll, while 46 percent disapprove.
The same poll shows voters still disapprove of the health-care bill 49-40 percent, which is slightly better than before the bill passed.
Meanwhile, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, who’d been critical of the Republican strategy in the health-care debate, was forced out of his job at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank yesterday, the Washington Post reported.