Democrats have completely forgotten about a public health insurance option, choosing instead to deliver expensive subsidies to their industry donors.

President Joe Biden has, not once since his inauguration, mentioned the public health insurance option he and every single competitive Senate Democratic challenger promised voters during the 2020 election.

The idea of creating a government-run health insurance plan that people could buy into has completely disappeared from the political conversation in Washington. Instead, Democrats have opted to deliver tens of billions of dollars of new government subsidies demanded by private health insurers that have funneled millions of dollars into Democratic campaign coffers.

BY Aditi Ramaswami & Andrew Perez

In their latest spending bill, Democrats once again chose to give $42 billionin additional subsidies to private health insurers to help steer people into plans that feature high out-of-pocket costs and routine claim denials, as those insurers continue to raise premiums.

The move further entrenches Democrats’ 2010 health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the corporate health insurance industry — rather than bringing the country closer to achieving universal coverage and saving the federal government substantially more money in the long run.

While pundits frequently raise questions about how much money a single-payer health care system would cost, no one in Washington ever seems to consider the cost of the subsidies being used to prop up the health insurance industry. The total cost of the ACA subsidy scheme would likely exceed $800 billion over a decade if these expanded subsidies are renewed down the road, according to a Lever review of government analyses.

On Sunday, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a spending bill that — among other key health care provisions — would extend expanded federal health insurance subsidies for another three years. The expanded subsidies were first enacted last year in Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act to lower premiums in 2021 and 2022 for people buying individual health insurance plans through the ACA marketplaces.

For much of its history, the ACA’s premium tax credits only went to poorer families, creating what was known as a “subsidy cliff” that made it difficult for middle-class households to afford exchange plans. The American Rescue Plan expanded the eligibility criteria for these subsidies, with the policy halving monthly premium payments for millions of Americans.

Those subsidies are set to expire soon; without their extension, millions of marketplace enrollees would receive notices about sharp premium increases in October, shortly before the November midterm elections. Making matters worse: Insurers are preparing to hike premiums more than they have in recent years, with a median proposed increase of 10 percent for Americans on individual plans, according to a recent review by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the IRA proposal would prevent 3.1 million Americans from losing coverage, while lowering premiums for millions more. And thanks to the expanded subsidies, 2.8 million more people received the tax credits in 2022 than in 2021.

While the subsidies are clearly helping millions of Americans gain or keep health insurance coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, they are also a costly and remarkably inefficient giveaway to the health insurance industry at a time when such companies are raking in sky-high profits — all while health care costs remain the top financial concern for U.S. adults.

“The First Thing I Would Do As President”

During his presidential campaign, Biden pledged to build upon the ACA, commonly known as “Obamacare,” by providing Americans with a “choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare.”

In 2019, Biden said: "The first thing I would do as president is say, look, here’s the deal: We're going to eliminate all the changes that [the Trump] administration made trying to kill Obamacare, number one, and we're going to add to it a public option."

Democrats previously debated including a public option in the ACA in 2009 and 2010, before dropping the idea at the behest of the health insurance industry and conservative Democratic senators who all went on to become corporate lobbyists or join Washington’s lucrative influence industry.

Biden and the Democratic establishment once again pitched a public option during the 2020 campaign, as a compromise measure that could satisfy progressive voters demanding Medicare for All, and one that would stand a better shot at passage in Congress.

However, Biden has failed to push for such a vision since becoming president, with Democrats instead rallying around expanded subsidies for ACA plans — an idea ripped straight out of a list of recommendationsoffered by health insurance lobbyists.

In fact, since becoming president, Biden has not publicly uttered the phrase “public option” or “public health insurance option,” according to Factba.se, a website that maintains a searchable database of all of Biden’s speeches and interviews.

There was a brief mention of “creating a public option” in a White House fact sheet for Biden’s proposed American Families Plan last year, though Biden ultimately omitted the idea in his budget. As The Hill reported at the time, “While Biden supports a public option for health care, the budget did not assume the passage of any such proposal, leaving out key questions about costs and how to pay for it.”

And while it seemed for a moment like congressional Democrats were poised to introduce a public option bill, it wasn’t long before even progressive lawmakers gave up on the popular idea, despite long touting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (Ind.-Vt.) Medicare for All legislation that would offer every American government-run health coverage.

READ MORE:

https://www.levernews.com/where-did-the-public-option-go/

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