Obama chose JAMA as a “serious” and “fact-driven” forum, Canegallo said.
‘High Standards’
A group of senior editors at JAMA reviewed and critiqued the article and its factual claims, said Howard Bauchner, the journal’s editor-in chief. The article went through two formal revisions and additional editing over two months, he said.
"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 said in an interview.
The journal also published four editorials accompanying Obama’s article, including one by Obama’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag. "Fundamentally, the ACA is working," he wrote.
Stuart Butler, a former official at the conservative Heritage Foundation who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution, wrote that "some troubling trends in the ACA" had not been "adequately discussed" in Obama’s article.
One of the chief problems with the law, he said, is that premiums and out-of-pocket costs for insurance plans sold in government-run insurance exchanges are too costly, which has discouraged enrollment by people who earn too much money to qualify for subsidies.
“For many households, the president’s promise of affordable coverage rings hollow and has not been realized,” Butler wrote.
Drug Prices
Describing work needed to improve the health law, Obama wrote that drug costs “remain a concern,” citing a 12 percent increase in prescription drug spending in 2014. He called for legislation to increase rebates drug manufacturers are required to provide to Medicaid and Medicare and to grant more authority to the federal government to negotiate prices on high-cost drugs.