Enacted a decade ago, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is serving as the framework in the new direction of health care policy.
President Joe Biden plans to work quickly with Congress in January to dramatically increase health care protections and offer Americans universal coverage and lower health care costs.
Biden will revisit many policies of the Obama administration and reform aspects of the ACA, introducing new policy initiatives like expanding ACA subsidies.
The administration plans to implement the following changes to Health Care:
Public Option Under the ACA
The public option would be a federally run health insurance plan in the marketplace exchange alongside private plans. Individuals who are eligible for exchange plans would also be able to choose the public option or one of the private plans. Their goal is to offer the ability to choose better coverage; for example, if you have coverage from your employer, but it is inadequate, this would allow you to choose a new Medicare-like public option with enhanced premium subsidies.
The public option would also cover primary care without co-payments, brining relief to small business struggling to afford employee coverage.
Lower the Medicare-Eligible Age to 60
Under this proposal, Americans ages 60-64 would be eligible to enroll in Medicare with the access to choose this option at age 60 instead of 65.
Expand ACA Subsidies
Biden proposes increasing the value of tax credits available to subsidize coverage purchased through the ACA exchanges. His goal is to help middle class families by eliminating the 400 percent income cap on tax credit eligibility and lowering the limit on the cost of coverage from 9.86% of income to 8.5%. This means no family purchasing insurance on the individual marketplace, regardless of income, will have to spend more than 8.5% of their income on health insurance.
Enact Drug-Pricing Reforms
Many of Biden’s policies focus on drug pricing and what federal programs pay for drugs. He hopes to require drug corporates to negotiate with Medicare over drug prices.
Stop the “Surprise” Out-of-Network Billing
Both parties favor efforts to end surprise billing, but haven’t been able to agree on the details. Under Biden’s plan, health care providers won’t be able to charge patients out-of-network rates when the patient doesn’t have control over which provider the patient sees (i.e., hospitalization).
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