Opinion | Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal
www.nytimes.com
Health coverage is one area where a president’s policy makes all the difference.

Biden, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, largely resolved these problems, reducing maximum premium payments (net of subsidies) and eliminating the cliff at 400 percent. 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.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    5•9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Biden deserves some political reward for this good news, given that Donald Trump and many in his party predicted economic and social disaster if he were elected, and that Republicans, in general, are still talking as if America were suffering from high inflation and runaway crime.

    Obamacare — which arguably should really be called Pelosicare, since Nancy Pelosi (who is not, whatever Trump may think, the same person as Nikki Haley) played a key role in getting it through Congress — led to big gains in health insurance coverage when it went into full effect in 2014.

    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.

    But it wasn’t and isn’t, so what we have instead is a sort of Rube Goldberg device, a mix of gadgets designed to expand access to health care with minimal disruption of existing arrangements.

    Those marketplaces, in which insurers are forbidden to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions and buyers receive subsidies to help them pay premiums, are a key part of the system.

    Biden, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, largely resolved these problems, reducing maximum premium payments (net of subsidies) and eliminating the cliff at 400 percent.

    The original article contains 903 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

      • @Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
        8•9 months ago

        Didn’t Romney himself say this would never work at the national level?

        Fuck Romney. He deserves no credit at all for something he specifically said he would never do for the nation if given the chance.

        • @TH1NKTHRICE@lemmy.ca
          1•9 months ago

          obamacarefacts.com

          It’s my understanding that the individual mandate requires people to buy health insurance from private companies, this means those companies can thrive while offering terrible coverage for high costs without any chance of losing business because of their shady practices. This sounds to me like a plan that a conservative would concoct if they really wanted Laissez-faire / croney capitalism but wanted to placate the left by making it sound like this was entirely government funded.

          If this is true, it’s a win-win for the right. Keep it in place and the private medical companies are secure to maintain high profit margins surreptitiously. If it fails, blame the left and you get an easy justification for going back to having no government involvement at all whereby less people pay monthly because there is no individual mandate but the private medical companies are free to charge even more to the people who do pay and when those that don’t pay need medical treatment (everyone eventually in their lifetime) they can charge an arm and a leg and laugh all the way to the bank while medical debt for citizens skyrockets. The best part? If this plan is put in place carefully enough and messaging is carefully crafted, you’ll get nominally left people advocating for it!

          Am I wrong?