Mark Pocan Predicts Successful Affordable Care Act Implementation

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., says it will be a bumpy road to the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The freshman in the House fielded questions about health care Thursday at a listening session at a Madison retirement home. Pocan says as one of Wisconsin’s three Democratic members of Congress, he’s disappointed with the repeated Republican efforts to repeal the health care reform act.

“They’re clearly a little bit obsessed [with] that, rather than getting the real problems of the federal budget done,” said Pocan. “We don’t have a federal budget. We can’t move forward with any appropriations. This isn’t really a productive Congress.”

But Pocan says he’s confident the major reforms of in the health care act will begin to take effect and opposition to it will begin to fade.

“If you have more people getting access, more people getting better access and costs are going down, that’s the perfect storm of what we’re trying to accomplish with the law and I think we’re going see that,” said Pocan.

Pocan says one of the bumps in the road for the bill’s implementation may be the federal government’s inability to make new health insurance options available in a user friendly on the internet, “because the federal government doesn’t have the best reputation for building websites.”

Pocan also fielded questions about his recent trip to Israel. He says conversations with Palestinians working on a people to people basis with Israeli’s rather than government to government appear to be building a firm foundation for a peaceful resolution there.