Biden reopens Obamacare enrollment to expand coverage amid COVID crisis

New York Daily News, The (NY)

Americans without health insurance will soon get a chance to sign up for taxpayer-subsidized coverage thanks to an executive order signed by President Biden on Thursday.

Biden’s order directs the HealthCare.gov website — which administers partially government-paid insurance plans — to reopen for a “special enrollment period” between Feb. 15 and May 15.

Despite the raging coronavirus pandemic, then-President Donald Trump refused to allow new applications for coverage via HealthCare.gov, which is the main marketplace for insurance provided under the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Throughout his presidency, Trump found various ways to chip away at the ACA — also known as Obamacare — but never repealed and replaced it despite a 2016 campaign promise to do so within 100 days of his inauguration.

Also as part of his Thursday executive order, Biden rolled back Trump’s implementation of work requirements on low-income Medicaid beneficiaries and rescinded a Trump rule that blocked U.S. foreign aid to groups promoting or facilitating abortions.

“There’s nothing new that we’re doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was before Trump became president,” Biden said as he signed the order in the Oval Office, adding he was also squashing his “predecessor’s attack on women’s health.”

The White House said Biden’s push for Obamacare expansion will be coupled with a national marketing campaign to get uninsured Americans to sign up.

Biden won’t need a congressional appropriation for the marketing campaign because the Trump administration left more than $1 billion that was unspent from the dormant Obamacare marketplaces, according to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

“The reason it wasn’t spent is the Trump administration spent its time in office cutting services that support consumer enrollment,” Karen Pollitz, a health insurance expert with the foundation, told The Associated Press. “All the while, the user fee revenue was coming in, [but] they were not allowed to spend it on anything other than marketplace operations.”

The Obamacare marketplace offers subsidized coverage regardless of a recipient’s medical history or preexisting conditions, including COVID-19.

With the pandemic battering the U.S. economy, many Americans have lost their employer-based insurance because of layoffs, and Biden’s hope is that the Obamacare extension could help them regain coverage.

Biden vowed during the campaign to expand Obamacare, with the goal of providing coverage for all Americans. To get to that point, though, Biden will likely need help from Congress, where hostility toward Obamacare is near universal among Republicans.

However, with both chambers of Congress under Democratic control, Biden may have a good shot at meaningful health care reform.

For Republicans, expanding Obamacare may also be a more favorable option to the mounting push for a “Medicare for All” system favored by progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Obamacare currently covers more than 23 million people through a mixture of subsidized private insurance and beefed up Medicaid benefits.

According to an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, nearly 32 million people in the U.S. are uninsured, including upward of 5 million who have lost their coverage because of pandemic-related layoffs.

The Trump rule on abortion that Biden scrapped has been a political football for decades.

Known as the “Global Gag Rule,” it bars any U.S. foreign aid from being funneled to health care organizations that provide abortion services. The rule has invariably been implemented by Republican presidents and scrapped by Democratic ones ever since it was first enacted under Ronald Reagan in 1985.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commended Biden on rescinding the rule and vowed to take it one step further.

“I’m eager to work with his administration to build on that effort in Congress. In fact, I’m starting today. This afternoon, I will introduce the bipartisan, bicameral Global HER Act to *permanently* repeal the Global Gag Rule,” Shaheen tweeted. “Enough is enough.”

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