Obama Just Proved He's The Nerdiest President In History
President Barack Obama just had another historic first.
He is now the first sitting president to publish a scholarly article, according to Fortune.
In other words, Obama is the nerdiest president in American history.
The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and is about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Obama used government data from 1963 to 2016 to analyze the effects of the health care plan.
In a shocking result, Obama found that Obamacare has been overwhelmingly helpful for the American people. Overall, since Obamacare went into effect, the rate of uninsured Americans went from 16 percent in 2010 to 9.1 percent in 2015. Obama writes that this decrease is mostly because of ACA effects.
Aside from that overall rate, Obama found that the ACA has made more people be able to access health care and decreased the financial costs of getting taken care of.
But, Obama wrote, there is still more room for improvement for whoever the next president ends up being.
First, he said, we're still in the early years of Obamacare and there are still adjustments to be made. Namely, Obama wants the 19 states that have not yet expanded their Medicaid programs to do so.
Obama also wants to see further changes to how payments are made and he wants government programs, like Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot, to continue looking to cure diseases.
The president wants the future government to provide more education to citizens about the financial help they can get for medical care — and to provide more financial help itself.
Obama also suggested creating a public plan to help decrease costs with more competition.
The president ended his report with one of his classic appeals for more friendliness in the government. He listed a series of "lessons" learned, mostly which amount to "oh my God, you guys, just work together."
Obama wrote,
The first lesson is that any change is difficult, but it is especially difficult in the face of hyperpartisanship.
The article was not peer-reviewed (which sets the standard for an article), but, Fusion reports, it had two months of fact-checking and revisions.
JAMA editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner told Bloomberg,
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.
Even the president of the United States faces the same scrutiny you get writing papers.
Obama ends the article confidently, saying that he believes Obamacare was a positive force for Americans and will continue to help them in the future, provided that Congress doesn't move backward and undo all this work.
What a nerd.
