Earlier, I wondered how Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn would do today on a White House conference call designed to push the merits of Obama's new health care law.

Answer: He did fine. Just fine.

Explaining why it's important for a Democratic mayor to talk up Obama's health care plan in a Democratic city that already loves the guy—and on a day when the Senate is likely to squelch efforts to repeal health care—McGinn said:

Let’s face it, there’s been a lot of misinformation spread about this health care bill, and any opportunity to spread truthful information is an opportunity I’m going to take.

Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott was also on the call. He described Republican efforts to repeal health care reform "a foolish political act" and said today's push to promote the law was being made because Democrats had learned lessons from last summer's health care mayhem. "“We’re a whole lot smarter," McDermott said. "The White House is smarter and so is the Congress.”

But the most interesting part of the call, to me, involved numbers. They're fascinating numbers in their own right, but they also show how much easier it is to defend against attempts to take specific pieces of the reform law away from people now than it was to defend, last summer, against attacks on the entire law as it was being proposed.

From the Seattle-centric fact sheet that people on the call were using:

Under the law, insurance companies can no longer place a lifetime cap on the dollar amount of coverage an individual can receive — freeing cancer patients and individuals suffering from other chronic diseases from having to worry about going without treatment because of their lifetime limits. The law also restricts the use of annual limits and bans them completely in 2014. But if the law is repealed, an estimated 446,000 Seattle residents with private insurance coverage will be vulnerable to these limits again.

And:

If the law is repealed, over 76,000 Seattle residents who have Medicare coverage would be denied critical free preventive care —like mammograms and colonoscopies— and would no longer get a free annual check-up visit. And over 5,381 Medicare beneficiaries in Seattle would see higher prescription drug costs because they would no longer receive a 50% discount on brand name prescription drugs when they hit the Medicare coverage gap — or ―donut hole‖ — in 2011. The Affordable Care Act closes this donut hole completely in 2020.

“Not only do we need to help people understand what’s in the law," said White House Deputy Senior Advisory Stephanie Cutter, "but we need to help people understand what’s at stake.”