Obama: Enough people have signed up -- health law will work

In a Friday interview with WebMD, President Barack Obama offered assurances that the health law's new marketplaces have had enough customers to ensure that insurance companies will stay in the system.

The Washington Post: Obama Says Enrollment Is High Enough To Ensure His Health Law's Survival
President Obama said Friday he was confident enough Americans had enrolled under the Affordable Care Act to make the program "stable." In an interview with WebMD, Obama said the fact that 4.2 million people have already signed up for plans under federal and state marketplaces mean enough companies will be invested to stay in the system (Eilperin, 3/14).

Politico: Obama: Health Care Law Has Enough Customers To Work 
Obamacare may not be beloved, but President Barack Obama says it's got enough customers to survive. In a sit-down interview with WebMD posted Friday, the president dismissed any concern that people resisting the law could somehow keep it from functioning. ... During the wide-ranging interview with WebMD's Lisa Zamosky, Obama also called out governors and state lawmakers who have resisted the health care law's massive expansion of Medicaid -; a decision he said was based purely on politics. "This is a source of great frustration for me," he said. "We don't have the ability at the federal level to pressure those states to do what they should be doing" (Cheney, 3/14). 

Reuters: Obama Says Enough People Signed Up To Make U.S. Healthcare Law Work 
President Barack Obama, aiming to allay concerns about the viability of his signature healthcare law, said on Friday enough people have enrolled to make its insurance marketplaces stable. "Well, at this point, enough people are signing up that the Affordable Care Act is going to work," Obama said in an interview with the medical website WebMD (Dunham, 3/14).

CBS News: Obama: I'm Confident Health Markets Will Be Stable
The administration will most likely fall short of its original enrollment goals for the new Obamacare marketplaces, but President Obama thinks enough people are enrolling to prop up the new insurance marketplace. "The pool is already large enough," Mr. Obama said in an interview with the medical website WebMD, published Friday. "I'm confident the program will be stable." The president's remarks come amid criticism of the way his administration is handling the individual mandate -- a policy that the White House says is critical to sustaining the marketplace (Condon, 3/14).

CNN: President Further Distances Him self From Obamacare 'Doctor' Pledge
"If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn't changed since the law was passed," Obama said in a speech to supporters of the Affordable Care Act. Now in an interview posted Friday on the medical website WebMD, Obama changed his rhetoric on this issue yet again - further distancing himself from his infamous pledge. "For the average person, many folks who don't have health insurance initially, they're going to have to make some choices, and they might end up having to switch doctors, in part because they're saving money," Obama said in response to a question about limited provider networks (Aigner-Treworgy, 3/14).