Health Care

The pride of ObamaCare

The president was back to his old self in the Rose Garden Tuesday, alternately celebrating the 7.1 million people who signed up for ObamaCare and demonizing all Americans who disagree with this law as folks bent on denying — or taking away — health-care insurance for their fellow citizens.

Certainly the 7.1 million figure is a real achievement, particularly given the early glitches at HealthCare.gov. Still, it’s a little early to declare the law is working. For example, we don’t know how many of these 7.1 million actually paid, how many were uninsured before and how many are the healthy, young people ObamaCare is counting on to subsidize older, sicker Americans.

The president says “this law is doing what it is supposed to be doing.” And he went on to thank the Democrats in Congress who pushed this law through. “They should be proud of what they’ve done,” he said.

On that, the president is absolutely right. If the results are as impressive and unequivocal as President Obama claims, and if he’s right that “the debate over repealing this law is over,” Democrats should be bragging about their support for this law instead of running away from it.

Which strikes us as a pretty good test of Obama’s credibility. Forget the Republican critics. We’ll take the president’s rosy Rose Garden claims seriously when we see the vulnerable senators who voted for it — from Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu to Arkansas’ Mark Pryor — do the same by telling their own constituents how “proud” they are of having voted for ObamaCare.