Mark McClellan, who helped implement the Medicare prescription drug benefit for President George W. Bush, says the two parties should separate their political battles over Obamacare from the need for broad public education about how the law will affect ordinary people.

Now at The Brookings Institution, McClellan was the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator when the largely GOP-designed drug benefit was rolled out from 2003 to 2006. He says the two parties had very strong differences over the prescription drug law but were able to have two parallel tracks — one fighting about the policy and one helping to explain what it would mean to a constituent.

“It would help if the political debate [on the health law] could be separate from the education of individuals for what the implementation of this program means for them,” McClellan said at a health policy conference at Princeton University on Friday.