Obama Signs Health Care Overhaul Bill

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON —With the strokes of 20 pens, President Obama signed his health care overhaul — the most sweeping social legislation enacted in decades — into law on Tuesday during a festive, at times raucous, White House ceremony.
“We have just now enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care,” Mr. Obama declared in the East Room, before an audience of more than 200 Democratic lawmakers, White House aides and others who rode a yearlong legislative roller-coaster ride that ended with Sunday night’s House passage of the bill. They interrupted him repeatedly with shouts and standing ovations.
Moments later, the president sat down at a table, and affixed his left-handed, curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, using 20 pens that he intended to pass out to key lawmakers and others as mementoes.
He was surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other top Democratic leaders, as well as some special guests: 11-year-old Marcelas Owens of Seattle, who became an advocate for health care reform after his mother died without health insurance, and Connie Anderson, the sister of Natoma Canfield, the Ohio cancer survivor whose struggle to pay skyrocketing premiums became a touchstone of Mr. Obama’s campaign to overhaul the system.
Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had been a driving force for health care legislation before his death last year, was also by Mr. Obama’s side. Mrs. Kennedy wore a blue plastic bracelet around her wrist that said “TedStrong,” and appeared emotional after the ceremony.
“I know how happy he would be,” she said of her husband, adding, “It was so meaningful for him, in a very personal way.”
Mr. Kennedy’s son, Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, was also there, carrying a gift for the president: a copy of a bill his father introduced in 1970 to provide national health insurance. On it, the younger Mr. Kennedy had written a personal message to Mr. Obama.
For Mr. Obama, the bill signing marks a high point of his presidency. For the many House members in the audience, it marks the end of a trying, chapter, and they let the president know it as he remarked that many had “taken their lumps during this difficult debate.”
To that, Represenative Gary Ackerman, the New York Democrat, shouted, “Yes we did!” — a riff on Mr. Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we can.” The crowd, including Mr. Obama, broke up laughing.
“Our presence here today is remarkable, and improbable,” the president said. “With all the punditry, all of the lobbying, all of the game-playing that passes for governing in Washington, it’s been easy at times to doubt our ability to do such a big thing, such a complicated thing; to wonder if there are limits to what we as a people can still achieve.”
The White House took on a festive air for the occasion, as senators mingled in the grand foyer of the Executive Mansion before the signing ceremony. A Marine pianist was playing as lawmakers and other guests chatted in anticipation of Mr. Obama’s arrival. As they filtered into the East Room, many lawmakers took out cameras to photograph one another and record the moment.
One moment that Vice President Biden probably did not intend to be recorded was the profane private congratulation he offered the president as they embraced after Mr. Biden’s introductory remarks. The comment, though not audible to others in the East Room, was picked up clearly by the broadcast microphones on the lectern where Mr. Biden had just lauded the president’s “perseverance” and “clarity of purpose” in achieving the health care overhaul, and it was soon circulating widely on the Internet.
The landmark bill, passed by the House on Sunday night by a vote of 219-212, will provide coverage to an estimated 30 million people who currently lack it. Its passage assures Mr. Obama a place in history as the American president who succeeded at revamping the nation’s health care system where others, notably Bill Clinton, tried mightily and failed.
The measure will require most Americans to have health insurance coverage; would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls; and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people. It will cost the government about $938 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has also estimated that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over a decade.
Despite the president’s signature, the legislative work on the measure is not over, nor is the intense partisan fight over it. Republicans are already vowing to repeal the bill. And the legislative battle will flare anew in the Senate on Tuesday, where lawmakers are set to take up a package of changes to the measure under the parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation.
At the Capitol, Representative John Boehner, the Republican leader, said it was no day to celebrate. “This is a somber day for the American people,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement. “By signing this bill, President Obama is abandoning our founding principle that government governs best when it governs closest to the people.”
The White House ceremony marked the beginning of what will be an intense sales pitch by the White House and leading Democrats to convince Americans of the benefits of the health bill. As soon as the ceremony was over, Mr. Obama went into campaign mode, traveling to the Interior Department — the federal building with the biggest auditorium the White House could find — where he addressed a crowd of 600 doctors, nurses, patients and federal employees.