He was just a tad off.
(CNSNews.com) – “Today is a day that is going to rank with the day we passed the civil rights bill in 1964,” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said in a speech on the House floor exactly four years ago today, as House Democrats moved to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote.
Before the March 21, 2010 vote, Democrats praised the bill. (The following remarks come from the March 21, 2010 Congressional Record.)
“Today we are doing something that ranks with what we did on Social Security or Medicare. This is the day on which we can all be proud if we vote for that legislation,” Dingell said, as he turned to “the facts” of the bill:
“Thirty-two more million Americans are going to have health care,” he said. “They don’t now. America, which has health care of the best character in the world, does not make it available to 32 million people because they can’t afford it, and Americans every day are losing their health care.”
Flash forward four years: With 10 days to go in the open enrollment period, the Obama administration says around 5 million Americans have signed up for insurance through the exchanges so far, but it does not know — or it does not say — how many of those people have actually paid their premiums; nor does it say how many of those 5 million were previously uninsured.