President Obama Defends Obamacare in Medical Journal

— -- President Obama took the unusual step of authoring a report in a prestigious medical journal to defend and draw attention to his signature Affordable Care Act. Obama is listed as the sole author of a report published today in the Special Communications section in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA).

Obama detailed progresses from the ACA or Obamacare, the most sweeping health care legislation passed in the U.S. since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965.

Using government data, Obama pointed out the legislation has succeeded in its goal of increasing insurance coverage with the uninsured rate dropping by 43 percent from 16 percent in 2010 to 9.1 percent in 2015. Additionally, he pointed out the number of uninsured individuals has declined from 49 million to 29 million during this same period.

He also says that the growth in Medicare spending has slowed since Obamacare took effect.

“Despite this progress, too many Americans still strain to pay for their physician visits and prescriptions, cover their deductibles, or pay their monthly insurance bills; struggle to navigate a complex, sometimes bewildering system; and remain uninsured," Obama wrote.

As the president prepares to leave office next year he called on policy makers to build on the legislation by reducing prescription drug costs and encouraging competition among insurance plans.

“We need to continue to tackle special interest dollars in politics," he wrote. "But we also need to reinforce the sense of mission in health care that brought us an affordable polio vaccine and widely available penicillin."

In editorials about the report, experts said more needed to be done to understand the full effects of Obamacare.

"With an estimated expansion in health insurance of 20 million individuals, President Obama is right to claim credit for the ACA," Jonathan Skinner of the Department of Economics at Dartmouth and Amitabh Chandra of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University wrote in an accompanying editorial. "But counting up the number of individuals with insurance is not enough to assess if the ACA was a success."

JAMA's editor-in-chief, Howard Bauchner, said the president needed to address those who remained uninsured and rising costs.

“Although the president outlines numerous future challenges, such as further expansion of Medicaid, controlling the increase in drug prices, and the need for greater competition in certain health care markets, he does not specifically directly address the 20 million to 25 million individuals who remain uninsured or the increase in health care costs in the private sector," Bauchner wrote in his editorial.

Dr. Mary Carr is a general surgery resident at the University of Colorado. She is a medical resident in the ABC News Medical Unit.