Excuse Me, But Did Y'All Notice Just How Good Obamacare Is Under Joe Biden?
It's more affordable, so more people are signed up than ever.
One thing we like about New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is that we can read his columns without ever feeling the need to smash anything, which can’t be said of everyone on the editorial page there. Another is that he shares our frustration that more people don’t seem to appreciate just how much terrific stuff Joe Biden has done in his first term, like keeping people from losing everything in the pandemic, making huge progress toward his climate goals, and just generally directing his team to go out and fix problems so government works better, from little glitches in Obamacare to long-overdue debt relief for folks whose student loan servicers screwed them. It’s like the guy is trying to give “technocrat” a good name!
In his Thursday column for the Times (we’re short on gift links but here’s a syndicated version that’s good for one non-subscriber visit), Krugman points out just how much better Obamacare has gotten under Biden. Biden hasn’t only fixed most parts of the Affordable Care Act that Donald Trump purposely broke in his effort to wreck it; he’s made the program more affordable and efficient than it was when Barack Obama left office.
Also, in an aside I love him for, Krugman says we should all be calling the ACA “Pelosicare” because of all then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi did to shepherd the legislation through Congress.
The ACA’s “erosion” under Trump, Krugman says,
has now been decisively reversed. The Biden administration just announced that 21 million people have enrolled for coverage through the A.C.A.’s health insurance marketplaces, up from around 12 million on the eve of the pandemic. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage that is standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, have gotten close.
And this gain, unlike some of the other good things happening, is all on Biden, who both restored aid to people seeking health coverage and enhanced a key aspect of the system.
That “key aspect,” Krugman explains, is a biggie: the premium subsidies that are meant to keep the ACA’s private insurance plans affordable, but which, when the program first rolled out, were often insufficient for people to afford their Affordable Care. Eligibility for the subsidies was also capped based on income, so if you made more than 400 percent of the poverty level, suddenly you lost the subsidy altogether.
And damned if Biden didn’t fix that, first in the American Rescue Plan, and then carried over into the Inflation Reduction Act. The subsidy cliff was replaced by tapered subsidies over 400 percent of the poverty level, and the subsidies were boosted significantly, reducing premiums across the board.
The result is to make health insurance coverage substantially more affordable, especially for middle-income Americans who previously earned too much to be eligible for subsidies. Hence the surge in marketplace enrollments.
Krugman adds that he’s not sure whether healthcare will again be a major issue in this year’s election, “But it should be.”
Biden has made health insurance coverage more accessible and more affordable for millions of Americans.
If Trump wins, however, he will try again to do away with Obamacare; he has said as much, and this time he could very well succeed. He promises to replace it with something “MUCH BETTER.” I guess this depends on your definition of better: In 2017, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump’s health plan would raise the number of uninsured by 32 million within a decade; that number would probably be larger today.
Well yes. Let’s make sure that, along with preserving democracy, restoring abortion rights, and electing enough Democrats to return the Democratic trifecta that got so much done in Biden’s first two years, we also talk a LOT about healthcare this year, assuming we don’t end up in a civil war over Texas’s right to force little kids to get caught in razor wire.
PREVIOUSLY!
[NYT / Krugman column at Herald-Review]
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Biden's only helping people so he'll get elected again. Republicans would never stoop so low as to try to help people.
GOP: No aid to Ukraine! We must help our own people first!
*Joe Biden helps our own people.*
GOP: Grrrrrr! This make me mad! We must sabotage everything and punish as much people as we can!