BOSTON -- Citing needed support for health care reform, President Barack Obama said Thursday that Gov. Deval Patrick should have the power to appoint an interim senator to fill the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat.

Following up on his congressional address Wednesday night, Obama said he supports rewriting a 2004 election law to allow Patrick to appoint an interim senator to fill the seat.

The move would require many Massachusetts lawmakers to reverse the stances they took five years ago, when they stripped Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of appointment power.

Obama's Organizing for America committee said in an e-mail that the vacancy would deprive Massachusetts of full representation in the Senate, in turn, "depriving the country of a needed vote in favor of real health reform."

On Wednesday, Democrats told a crowded hearing in Boston that Patrick should be allowed to name an interim senator to fill the seat.

They told state lawmakers that filling the seat between now and the January special election will help ensure that health care overhaul legislation gets passed.

Under current law, the seat would remain vacant until the election. Kennedy himself had asked that the law be changed, shortly before he died last month of brain cancer.

The state's other U.S. senator, John Kerry, told lawmakers that "every vote will count" on health care, which Kennedy had said was the focus of his life's work in the Senate.

Republicans, who are vastly outnumbered in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, called the proposal a power grab. They point out that just five years ago, when Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president, Democrats changed the law to block then-Gov. Mitt Romney from naming a Republican to fill Kerry's seat if he became president.