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Opinion Democrats could pass a huge achievement — if they rally behind this measure

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Catherine Rampell
Columnist |
July 26, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

What’s left of Build Back Better could still represent a massive achievement — at least if Democrats are willing to rally behind one key measure.
Thanks partly to the fickle judgment of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the legislative package formerly known as BBB is now, apparently, a health-care bill. Technically, it was a health-care bill last year, too, but it was perceived as mostly a lots-of-other-things bill.
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The excision of those many other things (climate, child care, etc.) has been disappointing, to be sure. But a monumental health-care milestone is nearly at hand: virtually universal eligibility for health coverage, which all other rich countries already guarantee.
The United States was supposed to notch this achievement back in 2010, via the kludgy law known as Obamacare. Through a patchwork of programs phased in over the next few years — a Medicaid expansion, subsidies to purchase individual-market insurance, eligibility to stay on parents’ health plans for longer, protections for people with preexisting conditions, etc. — Obamacare was intended to grant all Americans access to some form of health coverage.
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But thanks to sloppy drafting, political miscalculations, deliberate sabotage by Republicans and inconvenient court decisions, we’re not there yet. Millions of Americans still fall through the cracks. Among the biggest reasons: Medicaid expansion was supposed to be required of all states, but the Supreme Court said they could choose not to participate. Today, a dozen GOP-controlled states remain holdouts, despite increasingly generous federal subsidies incentivizing them to participate.
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As a result, roughly 2.2 million Americans below the poverty line — mostly in the South, and mostly people of color — still have no access to reliable health care, nor any feasible route to obtain coverage.
Democrats’ ongoing budget negotiations are widely reported to include some other health-care measures. Chief among them is a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for certain expensive drugs, which would save the government money. Another proposal would expand subsidies for individual-market insurance coverage, making these plans more affordable for lower- and middle-income Americans. (This is an extension of a temporary policy change included in last year’s covid relief bill.)
Manchin has reportedly indicated his support for both of these broadly popular changes. But the fate of those 2.2 million Americans unlucky enough to live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid remains in limbo


A previous iteration of BBB would have addressed the problem by making everyone in that “gap” population eligible for fully subsidized coverage through the Obamacare individual-market exchanges. That design, which would cost $57 billion for coverage lasting four years, had been crafted to appease preferences Manchin himself expressed last year. Whether he will support something similar now, though, or whether senior Democrats in the Senate and White House are willing to go to bat for it, is unclear.
Relative to those other health proposals, plugging the Medicaid coverage gap has not exactly been a Democratic priority. After all, the vast majority of those affected live in red states and are not represented by Democratic senators. But Democratic politicians have a duty to make sure these people finally get health insurance and the better outcomes that go with it.
This duty is partly political: Democrats control the Senate because they won both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia’s January 2021 runoff. The winning candidates pledged to fix this problem, as Georgia is one of the dozen holdout states. One of those victors, Raphael G. Warnock, is now in a tight reelection race; delivering on this promise would help keep him in office.
Meanwhile, a lot of the Americans in the coverage gap are represented by Democratic House members, who could also use the help in a tough midterm year.
But the more compelling case for Democrats to finally fix this problem is the moral one. Democrats have argued (persuasively!) that everyone deserves access to health coverage, whatever their income or geography. And given the expected makeup of Congress next year, this is likely their last shot at delivering (for all except the undocumented, at least) for a while. If Democrats don’t fix the Medicaid coverage gap now, that’s tantamount to deciding that poor, mostly non-White Americans will have to make do without health care for the indefinite future.
This would be unwelcome news under any circumstances — but it’s especially troubling in this post-Roe era. Of the dozen states that have refused to expand Medicaid, 10 have already or will soon put into place severe abortion restrictions or outright bans. More poor women will be forced to give birth in a country that already has the worst maternal death rates in the industrialized world. This development should only strengthen the moral case for universal health coverage, so that women have reliable access to care before, during and after pregnancy.
Democrats have yet to complete the unfinished business of Obamacare. Now is their chance, and their obligation, to do it.

 
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