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To Dallas Health Care Volunteers: "Nothing Is Going to Stop Us from Getting This Done."

Summary: 
President Obama traveled to Dallas, Texas to meet with local volunteers who have been helping their neighbors enroll in affordable health insurance plans through the Marketplace.

On Wednesday, the President traveled to Dallas, Texas, where he joined canvassers and navigators who are part of the community's most active group of volunteers working to enroll their neighbors in quality, affordable coverage through the Marketplace.

The President personally thanked them for their work, calling out the fact that ultimately, "all the politics, all the chatter sometimes leaves out the fact that the system we had -- the status quo -- just wasn't working for too many people."

"...Now what we’ve got to do is sign up those folks who don’t have health insurance and improve insurance for those who are under-insured, who don’t have very good insurance, and have been subject to the whims of the insurance company. And that’s what this is all about. And that’s the challenge that we’ve got over the next month, three months, six months, next year. And if we get that done -- when we get that done -- then we will have created a stable system in which there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be getting health care in this country."

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at an Affordable Care Act event at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 6, 2013.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at an Affordable Care Act event at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 6, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

At a time when 24 states -- Texas included -- have neglected to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion available to working families in their states under the Affordable Care Act, the President acknowledged that 133,000 Texans in Dallas alone would immediately have coverage if Texas decided to expand the program.

"So one of the things that sometimes gets me a little frustrated, although I understand it because I’m in politics, is folks who are complaining about how the website is not working, and why isn’t Obama fixing this, and all these people are uninsured, and yet they're leaving a million people right now without health insurance that they could immediately fix. There’s not a lot of logic to that. 

But that's okay, because we’ve gone through barriers before; we have gone through struggles before.  Eventually, though, if you stick with doing the right thing, you get it done. It will happen, all right?"

You can read the President's full remarks here.


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