“The Biden Plan” Guarantees Universal Healthcare Coverage
By Keya Mann
For decades, the United States has been at a crossroads when it comes to choosing private or public coverage for healthcare insurance. As of 2016, the country ranked 27th worldwide in terms of healthcare, because of which policymakers have begun to make several attempts to improve the system. One such attempt was the Affordable Care Act from the Obama Administration in 2010, which proved to be fairly successful.
In the past few years, the Trump administration has focused on weakening the Affordable Care Act. According to Kimberly Amadeo from the Balance in April 2020, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in late 2017, removing the Obamacare tax from people without health insurance. Amadeo further explained that “health care costs will rise because there will be fewer healthy people paying premiums, [meaning] health insurance companies will be left with just the sicker people,” so “fewer people will get preventive care or treatment for chronic diseases.”
Considering the many flaws that the COVID-19 pandemic has recently uncovered, healthcare will play a crucial role in this year’s presidential elections. There are those, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, a former Democratic presidential nominee, who rally behind Medicare for All, which guarantees that “all basic health needs are covered” and that “middle class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as [America] move[s] to a publicly funded program,” as he explained during his speech last July in Washington.
However, according to the Harvard Business Review, what Sanders does not account for is that Medicare for All will cause Americans “to lose their private health insurance to a public bureaucracy or to pay it’s $3.2 trillion annual price tag in the form of higher taxes.” They further claim that “the public option, which would allow people to choose from Medicare or private insurers,” would allow the United States to attain universal coverage while optimizing the cost and quality of health care. This is precisely what former Vice President Joe Biden ensures with “The Biden Plan to Protect and Build on the Affordable Care Act.”
When asked about his healthcare agenda during the first democratic debate last June in Miami, Biden stated that his plan is to “build on what [the Obama-Biden Administration] did,” which would allow “[e]veryone, whether they have private insurance, employer insurance, or no insurance…[to] buy in exchange [for] a Medicare-like plan.” He later states that he will build on ACA by “giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making [the United States’] health care system less complex to navigate” on his Biden for President Campaign page.
The plan also removes the income cap of 400% of the federal poverty level and prevents families “buying insurance on the individual marketplace, regardless of income, [from spending] more than 8.5% of their income on health insurance.” Most importantly, Biden’s plan ensures that 4.9 million people who live in states that don’t participate in ACA’s Medicaid eligibility will receive Medicaid benefits and that all middle class families will save about half the amount of money they pay for premiums, due to the fact that tax credits will be calculated from a gold plan, not the silver plan in place in the status quo. This allows all Americans to have the option to choose between public or private coverage, which is much more sustainable than both the current healthcare system and Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
Not only does Biden’s plan provide more coverage, but it also eradicates the discrimination that is currently incorporated in the US healthcare system. The Biden for President campaign states that Biden’s plan will stop “healthcare providers and insurance companies [from discriminating] based on a patient’s gender identity or abortion history,” allow all people to have equal access to healthcare, and will repeal the Mexico City Policy, which “currently bars the U.S. federal government from supporting important global health efforts.” Biden also supports covering undocumented immigrants under his plan, stating that “you cannot let people who are sick- no matter where they come from, no matter what their status- go uncovered. You can’t do that. It’s just going to be taken care of, period. You have to. It’s the humane thing to do.” This is definitely a win for Biden, considering that discrimination that he works to dismantle has been ingrained in the healthcare system for decades.
Biden’s election will guarantee proper healthcare insurance to millions of Americans unable to attain it in the status quo, which prevails over Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and Trump’s tax cuts on the ACA, regardless of what insurance plan Americans choose.
