The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart opened his interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius last night with a challenge. “I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.”
The interview started off light-hearted, but Stewart – a usual supporter of healthcare reform – was determined to get some answers to his question about why the Obamacare employer mandate was delayed a year but the individual mandate wasn’t.
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“If I’m an individual who doesn’t want this […] it would be hard for me to look at a big business getting a waiver and not having to do it, and me having to,” he said. “I would think, geez it looks like because I don’t have a lobbying group […] I would feel like you were favoring big business because they lobbied you to delay it because they didn’t want to do it this year, but you’re not allowing individuals that same courtesy.”
Sebelius did her best to talk around the question, explaining that big businesses are already in the market, emphasizing that small companies have no mandates and reiterating that nothing that helps individuals buy insurance on the new marketplaces has been delayed. But in a monologue at the end of the show, a frustrated Stewart exclaimed that he still didn’t understand why individuals had to sign up for Obamacare but businesses didn’t.
His other big concern was whether the administration would be able to redeem itself after the sloppy start to open enrollment in health insurance exchanges. While Sebelius wouldn’t say how many people had enrolled in the first six days, she said that hundreds of thousands of accounts had been created, and the administration would issue monthly reports. Defending the exchanges, she said they were already working better than they were on day one.
It seems she did a better job of convincing him on that one. In another segment of the show, Steward called out the American people on criticism of the glitches. “We will camp out all night to be the first people to buy a phone or see a movie about shirtless werewolves, but you’ve got 10 minutes to get me this f*@#& healthcare!”
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