President Barack Obama has made the case for the Affordable Care Act just about everywhere: on television shows, in online skits, in personal appeals to the American people. On Monday, he went back to his academic roots and published a paper in one of the country’s foremost medical journals to defend his signature health care law.
In what Bloomberg called a “first for a sitting president,” an article written by “Barack Obama, JD” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, reviewing the Affordable Care Act and next steps for a future president to take.
Among those steps: slashing prescription drug costs and introducing a “public option” insurance plan, which he had championed during his first presidential bid but which was ultimately omitted from the Affordable Care Act.
Kristie Canegallo, a deputy White House chief of staff, told Bloomberg that the article was intended to “point future policy makers in the right direction” on health care.
Publication in the Journal of the American Medical Assocation is highly prized. But the article, “United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps,” was billed as a “special communication” and was not peer-reviewed, Fortune reported.
The journal’s editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner told Bloomberg that the piece was edited by some of the journal’s senior editors for two months before publication.
“While we of course recognized the author is the president of the United States, JAMA has enormously high standards and we certainly expected the president to meet those standards,” Bauchner told Bloomberg.
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