Starting next week, millions of uninsured Americans will have the opportunity to sign up for coverage on the federal insurance marketplace, the result of President Biden’s executive order to create a 90-day special enrollment period. The graphic above highlights the potential impact of this enrollment period on the uninsured population.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, of the nearly 15M uninsured who are marketplace-eligible,nearly 9M qualify for free or subsidized coverage. Enrollment of these individuals will come with added challenges, as they tend to be less educated, younger, more rural, and less likely to speak English, as compared to the general population. An Urban Institute survey foundalmost half of uninsured individuals are unfamiliar with marketplace coverage options, and nearly two-thirds lack an understanding of available financial assistance.
The federal government is dedicating $50M to advertise the special enrollment period, to assist with outreach and education. Given the population most likely to have lost insurance due to the COVID pandemic, this funding will be critical to making sure eligible people take advantage or free or low-cost coverage.
Ahead of a Supreme Court hearing in March to consider the legality of imposing work requirements as a condition of gaining Medicaid coverage, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were expected to inform states on Friday of plans to rescind the controversial Trump administration policy.
Under the previous administration, ten states had applied for and were approved to use waiver authority to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees, and several other states were in the process of submitting applications. Critics (including us) have long held that such requirements, while nominally intended to introduce an element of “personal responsibility” to the safety-net coverage program for low-income Americans, actually serve to hinder access to care, and jeopardize the health status of already vulnerable populations; in addition, the added expense of program infrastructure often exceeds anticipated cost savings.
The policy was a favored project of former CMS administrator Seema Verma, who helped craft a similar program for the state of Indiana before joining the Trump administration. Among states granted waiver authority to impose work requirements, only Arkansas ever fully implemented the policy, before the legality of the waivers was challenged successfully in lower courts.
The Biden administration’s recision of work requirements is part of a broader reversal of Trump-era healthcare policies. This week the Justice Department notified the Supreme Court that it was switching sides in the closely watched case questioning the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), although the court has already heard the case and is expected to rule this spring. Starting Monday, the Biden team will also reopen the federal insurance marketplace for a special enrollment period, bolstering funding for outreach to ensure those eligible are aware of coverage options. And as part of its proposed COVID relief legislation, the administration plans toincrease subsidies to help individuals buy coverage on the exchanges, and to increase funding to support state Medicaid programs—policies that got a boost this week from a broad coalition of healthcare industry groups, including health plans, doctors, and hospitals.
As the administration rounds out its health policy team, we’d expect a continuedfocus on strengthening the core pillars of the ACA, along with a greater focus on ensuring health equity and addressing disparities. Meanwhile, two key positions remain unfilled: CMS administrator and commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These slots will likely remain open until the looming confirmation battle over Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, has been settled.
The groups said that Americans “deserve a stable healthcare market that provides access to high-quality care and affordable coverage for all.”
This week, a coalition of healthcare and employer groups called for achieving universal health coverage by expanding financial assistance to consumers, bolstering enrollment and outreach efforts, and taking additional steps to protect those who have lost or are at risk of losing employer-based coverage because of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They have banded together to advocate for achieving universal coverage via expansion of the Affordable Care Act, which is supported by President Biden. Biden also intends to achieve universal coverage through a Medicare-like public option — a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurers.
WHAT’S THE IMPACT
Despite a lot of pre-election talk about universal healthcare coverage from elected officials and those vying for public office, achieving this has remained an elusive goal in the U.S. In a joint statement of principles, the groups said that Americans “deserve a stable healthcare market that provides access to high-quality care and affordable coverage for all.”
“Achieving universal coverage is particularly critical as we strive to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and work to address long-standing inequities in healthcare access and outcomes,” the groups wrote.
The organizations support a number of steps to make health coverage more accessible and affordable, including protecting Americans who have lost or are at risk of losing employer-provided health coverage from becoming uninsured.
They also want to make Affordable Care Act premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions more generous, and expand eligibility for them, as well as establish an insurance affordability fund to support any unexpected high costs for caring for those with serious health conditions, or to otherwise lower premiums or cost-sharing for ACA marketplace enrollees.
Also on the group’s to-do list: Restoring federal funding for outreach and enrollment programs; automatically enrolling and renewing those eligible for Medicaid and premium-free ACA marketplace plans; and providing incentives for additional states to expand Medicaid in order to close the low-income coverage gap.
THE LARGER TREND
The concept of universal coverage is gaining traction among patients thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, A Morning Consult poll taken in the pandemic’s early days showed about 41% of Americans say they’re more likely to support universal healthcare proposals. Twenty-six percent of U.S. adults say they’re “much more likely” to support such policy initiatives, while 15% say they’re somewhat more likely.
As expected, Democrats were the most favorable to the idea, with 59% saying they were either much more likely or somewhat more likely to support a universal healthcare proposal. Just 21% of Republicans said the same. Independents were somewhere in the middle, with 34% warming up to the idea of blanket coverage.
More than 21% of Republicans said they were less likely to support universal care in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Seven percent of independents reported the same, while for Democrats the number was statistically insignificant.
During his campaign, President Joe Biden said he supported a public option for healthcare coverage. He also pledged to strengthen the Affordable Care Act. By executive order, Biden opened a new ACA enrollment period for those left uninsured. It begins February 15 and goes through May 15.
Under the Biden Administration, the DOJ says the ACA can stand even though there is no longer a tax penalty for not having health insurance.
The Department of Justice, under the Biden Administration, has told the Supreme Court that it has changed its stance on the Affordable Care Act.
The DOJ previously filed a brief contending that the ACA was unconstitutional because the individual mandate was inseverable from the rest of the law.
Following the change in Administration, the DOJ has reconsidered the government’s position and now takes the position that the ACA can stand, even though there is no longer a mandate for consumers to have health insurance or face a tax penalty, according to a February 10 filing.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Hospitals and health systems support the change in position.
“Without the ACA, millions of Americans will lose protections for pre-existing conditions and the health insurance coverage they have gained through the exchange marketplaces and Medicaid. We should be working to achieve universal coverage and preserve the progress we have made, not take coverage and consumer protections away,” said American Hospital Association CEO and president Rick Pollack.
The Supreme Court is expected to return a decision before the end of the term in June.
THE LARGER TREND
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on November 10, 2020 regarding whether the elimination of the tax penalty made the remainder of the ACA invalid under the law.
The DOJ sided with the Trump Administration and Republican states that brought the legal challenge, while 20 Democratic attorneys general supported the ACA and asked the court for quick resolution.
A growing body of research keeps undermining a key tenet of health economics, Axios’ Sam Baker writes — the belief that requiring patients to pay more out of their own pockets will make them smarter consumers, forcing the health care system to deliver value.
Driving the news:Even a seemingly modest increase in out-of-pocket costs will cause many patients to stop taking drugs they need, according to a new working paper from Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra.
Raising Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs by just $10 per prescription led to a 23% drop in overall drug consumption, and to a 33% increase in mortality.
And seniors weren’t simply ditching “low-value” drugs. People at high risk for heart attacks or strokes cut back on statins and blood-pressure medications even more than lower-risk patients.
Between the lines: This research focuses on Medicare’s drug benefit, but higher cost-sharing is all the rage throughout the system, and there’s little evidence that it has generated “smarter shoppers.”
Patients with high-deductible plans — increasingly common in the employer market — don’t shop around for the best deal, which is all but impossible to do in many cases even if you wanted to try.
Thursday was healthcare day at the Biden White House, the latest in a series of themed days during which the President has issued executive orders on topics ranging from COVID response to climate change to racial equity.
Facing a closely divided Congress, the new administration has focused so far on actions it can take unilaterally to advance its agenda, and as President Biden described it at a signing ceremony yesterday, his healthcare agenda is centered on “restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was” prior to the Trump administration.
The new executive order reopens the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace for a “special enrollment period”, lasting from mid-February to mid-May, allowing approximately 15M uninsured Americans in 36 states (including 3M who lost employer-based insurance due to COVID) to sign up for coverage, many subsidized by the federal government.
The order also instructs agencies to review many of the regulatory changes made by the Trump administration, including loosening restrictions on short-term insurance plans, and allowing states to use waivers to implement Medicaid work requirements. (Also included in Thursday’s action was a measure to immediately rescind the ban on taxpayer funding for abortion-related counseling by international nonprofits, the so-called “Mexico City rule”.)
Actually unwinding those Trump-era changes will take months (or possibly years) of regulatory work to accomplish, but Biden’s executive order puts that work in motion. Attention now turns to Congress, which the Biden team hopes will provide funding for increased subsidies for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, along with allocating money for the administration’s aggressive COVID response plan.
Yesterday’s executive order is best understood as the starting gun for the lengthy legislative and regulatory process that lies ahead, as the Biden administration tries to bolster the 2010 health reform law, and stamp its mark on American healthcare.
The nearest-term 2021 actions will likely center on bolstering the ACA and Medicaid, after the Trump administration took aim at both.
Even with Democrats’ surprise flipping of the Senate, enacting big healthcare policies in Congress will be a heavy lift given the razor-thin margin in that body and division within the party on strategy.
A clearer path for incoming president Joe Biden is to focus on reversing policies enacted by President Donald Trump at the executive level.Trump’s tenure has been defined in large part by a chipping away at key tenets of the Affordable Care Act, curtailing the Medicaid program and sweeping deregulations critics allege harm consumer protections.
The nearest-term actions the incoming administration is likely to take will center on bolstering the landmark health law and Medicaid, both of which has drawn more bipartisan backing in recent years. Below are what the Biden health administration is likely to roll back quickly after inauguration Wednesday.
Boosting Affordable Care Act marketplace
One of Biden’s first moves may be to open a special enrollment period to sign up for coverage during COVID-19, combined with more outreach and enrollment assistance, Cynthia Cox, director of the ACA program at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said.
Beyond COVID-19, it’s likely the Biden administration will restore federal spending on navigation, marketing and outreach for exchange plans. For example, the Trump administration reduced the minimum number of navigator programs in each state using the federal marketplace to one. Biden could return it to two, and might also bring back the requirement that navigators have a physical presence in their service area.
Biden is also likely to unilaterally shore up standards for brokers, and take steps to bolster the exchange website healthcare.gov.
The Trump administration in December proposed a rule encouraging states to privatize their health insurance marketplaces instead of using healthcare.gov, which will make it more difficult for consumers to shop between plans and could divert people to subpar coverage, Tara Straw, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote in a December blog post.
The rule doubles down on the administration’s approval of a Georgia waiver to privatize its marketplace in November, but would allow states to follow suit and rely entirely on third-party brokers without a waiver.
That rule is not yet final, so Biden’s HHS will likely remove it from the Federal Register to avoid fragmenting marketplace functions.
Biden could also beef up consumer protections and standards for web brokers, which also sell skimpy short-term health insurance and other non-ACA-compliant coverage.
Biden is also likely to re-expand the annual enrollment period. In 2017, the Trump administration shortened the annual enrollment period to 45 days. Biden’s HHS could use rulemaking to return that period to three full months.
The incoming administration could also reverse previous CMS guidance on Section 1332 waivers that let states subvert or sidestep ACA protections on coverage and cost. The Trump administration proposed a rule in November to codify the waiver standards in regulation but — despite a recent wave of proposed and final regulations as the Trump administration hustles to preserve its health agenda — the rule has not yet been finalized, so HHS could remove it from the Federal Register as well.
By nixing the rule, Biden could also help reverse Trump administration cuts from 2018 that slashed user fees on healthcare.gov plans. The November proposed rule would further decimate the fees, which finance a large swath of marketplace operating expenses, to 2.25% in 2022, versus 3% in 2021 and 3.5% last year.
One key tenet of Biden’s health agenda is to expand ACA subsidies to more low-income Americans, something he can’t do without Congress.However, Biden could use administrative processes to reverse a Trump-era method for indexing marketplace subsidies that kicked in for the 2020 plan year, which led to a small reduction in the financial aid.
Dialing back short-term and association health plans
Biden’s HHS could also roll back the controversial expansion of short-term health plans, bare-bones coverage that isn’t required to cover the 10 essential health benefits under the ACA.
Short-term plans were created as inexpensive stop-gap insurance that could last for up to three months, giving consumers peace of mind while they shopped more comprehensive coverage. However, in 2018, the Trump administration expanded the duration of the plans to 12 months, with a three-year renewal period, and also allowed all consumers — not just those who couldn’t afford other options — to purchase them.
HHS touted the expansion as giving consumers more options, while noting they weren’t meant for everyone. A yearlong investigation by House Democrats found the plans widely discriminate against women and people with pre-existing conditions, and had major coverage limitations leaving unwitting consumers susceptible to surprise medical bills.
The Biden administration could enact stricter limits against the sale of the plans. Through additional rulemaking, HHS could limit future enrollment or make it harder to renew short-term coverage, enact stronger consumer protections or beef up standards to limit their sale.
Though actions around limiting new people coming into the plans are likely, Biden may wait to see if Congress takes up the issue, experts say.
A growing number of Americans in the individual healthcare market have subscribed the inexpensive coverage amid skyrocketing medical costs. Roughly 3 million consumers bought the plans in 2019, a 27% growth from 2018, the investigation found. The explosive growth in use makes it a bit less likely Biden’s HHS would pursue immediate, unilateral movement in the space, for fear of kicking Americans off their coverage.
Biden could also reverse Trump’s regulatory changes that have been friendly to association health plans, which allow small businesses or groups to band together to offer coverage. Though the ACA enhanced oversight of the coverage, the Trump administration in June 2018 issued a rule exempting them from rules regulating individual and small-group employer coverage.
As a result, association health plans were allowed to exclude or charge more on the basis of gender, age or other factors.
A federal court invalidated the rule later that year, and some states took legislative or regulatory actions to discourage the use of association health plans. However, the plans —which cover an estimated 3 million Americans — are still not required to cover all essential health benefits, making them a likely target for the Biden administration.
“It is something that we’re going to see some action on pretty soon, but it’s challenging. You don’t want to take those plans away from people, especially during a pandemic,” Cox said.
Expanding Medicaid coverage, eligibility
The Trump administration has given red states new avenues to constrict their Medicaid programs, which provide safety-net health insurance to some 75 million Americans.
Biden will likely first revise state demonstration waiver policies to expand coverage. Among other measures, Biden could get rid of past CMS guidance allowing states to play with Medicaid eligibility through work requirements, controversial programs tying coverage eligibility to work or volunteering hours, and to cap program funding.
Tennessee this month became the first state to receive a federal green light to convert its Medicaid funding to a block grant, following controversial CMS guidance issued early last year. Republicans tout block grants as a way to lower costs, while Democrats oppose the models as capped funding could lead to restricted benefits down the line, especially during times of emergency like a pandemic or natural disaster.
It’s more difficult to roll back a waiver if it’s already been approved, but Biden could put restrictions on it or reverse the decision before it goes into effect, experts say, though Tennessee would have an opportunity to object.
There are also actions Biden could take to reinstate certain beneficiary protections, which would require regulatory changes, KFF researchers say. Those include revising or stopping pending proposals that would change how Medicaid eligibility is determined in a way that would probably result in previously eligible people losing coverage by enacting more documentation requirements; change the government’s methodology for recouping improper payments; and reduce enhanced federal funding for eligibility workers.
Biden’s administration could also tweak regulations that have already been finalized, including the final Medicaid managed care rule for 2020 that relaxed network adequacy, beneficiary protections and quality oversight.
President Joe Biden is expected to sign executive actions this week related to immigration, healthcare and climate, according to a memo obtained by The Hill.
The executive actions would follow 10 he signed Jan. 21 to combat COVID-19 spread.
Here are the three healthcare executive actions to expect Jan. 28, according to The Hill:
1. President Biden is set to rescind a policy banning foreign aid for abortion, known as the Mexico City policy. It prohibits the use of U.S. funds for foreign and national health organizations that perform or actively promote abortion, according to NBC News. The policy was announced by former President Ronald Reagan in 1984. According to The Hill, it has been rescinded by Democratic presidents and reinstated by Republican presidents, including former President Donald Trump, since then.
2. President Biden will also call for a review of the Title X family planning program, according to a memo obtained by The Hill. The federal program provides family planning and related preventive health services for low-income or uninsured people and others. In 2019, the Trump administration issued a final rule prohibiting providers that receive federal family planning money under the program from providing or promoting abortions. NBC News reported that the Biden administration is expected to back off this rule and “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” which left the program in 2019.
3. President Biden plans to sign an executive action on Medicaid and initiate an open enrollment period under the ACA, according to a memo obtained by The Hill. The annual open enrollment period for 2021 closed in December. However, President Biden could initiate a special enrollment period.
As happened with cars in the 1960s, price competition among brand-name drugs is hard to find.
Before 1973, when the Arab oil embargo upended the U.S. auto industry, Americans witnessed an annual ritual by carmakers. In the late summer, the Big Three — Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors — would release sticker prices for their products, always showing increases, of course.
Almost always, the increases from each company for similar models were nearly identical. If one company’s was out of line — substantially bigger or smaller than its erstwhile competitors’ — it quickly made an adjustment. Explicit collusion to fix prices was never proven, but the effect for consumers was the same.
Now, researchers report that something very similar seems to be occurring for big-market brand-name drugs, including anti-diabetic medications and blood thinners.
Average wholesale prices for products in five classes — direct-acting oral anticoagulants (DOACs), P2Y12 inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists, dipeptidyl dipeptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors, and sodium-glucose transport protein-2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors — increased in “lock-step” each year from 2015 to 2020, according to Joseph Ross, MD, of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues writing in JAMA Network Open.
These increases ranged from annual averages of 6.6% for DDP4 inhibitors to 13.5% for P2Y12 inhibitors — far outpacing not only inflation in general, but even the 2.1% average for all prescription drugs.
Within each class, Kendall τb correlation coefficients for average wholesale prices were as follows:
DOACs: 0.98
SGLT-2 inhibitors: 0.98
DPP-4 inhibitors: 0.96
GLP-1 agonists: 0.92
P2Y12 inhibitors: 0.75
“These results suggest there was little price competition among the sponsors of these products,” Ross and colleagues wrote.
Although the analysis came with significant limitations — it didn’t account for rebates or other discounts, for example — the researchers said some patients must suffer from these increases.
“Rebates, list prices, and net prices have been growing for brand-name medications, and rebate growth has been shown to positively correlate with list price growth, thereby impacting costs faced by patients paying a percentage of (or the full) list price,“ the group noted. “Therefore, the lock-step price increases of brand-name medications, without evidence of price competition, raise concerns and would be expected to adversely affect patient adherence to medications and thus clinical outcomes.”
For the car buyers, the solution to lock-step price increases was imposed from outside: soaring gas prices in the mid-1970s prompted demand for vehicles with better fuel economy than domestic makers were prepared to sell. That opened the market to Japanese cars that not only got better mileage, but were also more reliable and (in many cases) cheaper than Big Three products. Thus ended Detroit’s ability to set prices.
How to rein in Big Pharma is less clear. For their part, Ross and colleagues suggested policies to limit such lock-step price hikes, shortened patent exclusivity periods, and faster introduction of generic equivalents.
President Biden is scheduled to take executive actions as early as Thursday to reopen federal marketplaces selling Affordable Care Act health plans and to lower recent barriers to joining Medicaid.
The orders will be Biden’s first steps since taking office to help Americans gain health insurance, a prominent campaign goal that has assumed escalating significance as the pandemic has dramatized the need for affordable health care — and deprived millions of Americans coverage as they have lost jobs in the economic fallout.
Under one order, HealthCare.gov, the online insurance marketplace for Americans who cannot get affordable coverage through their jobs, will swiftly reopen for at least a few months, according to several individuals inside and outside the administration familiar with the plans. Ordinarily, signing up for such coverage is tightly restricted outside a six-week period late each year.
Another part of Biden’s scheduled actions, the individuals said, is intended to reverse Trump-era changes to Medicaid that critics say damaged Americans’ access to the safety-net insurance. It is unclear whether Biden’s order will undo a Trump-era rule allowing states to impose work requirements, or simply direct federal health officials to review rules to make sure they expand coverage to the program that insures about 70 million low-income people in the United States.
The actions are part of a series of rapid executive orders the president is issuing in his initial days in office to demonstrate he intends to steer the machinery of government in a direction far different from that of his predecessor.
Biden has been saying for many months that helping people get insurance is a crucial federal responsibility. Yet until the actions planned for this week, he has not yet focused on this broader objective, shining a spotlight instead on trying to expand vaccinations and other federal responses to the pandemic.
The most ambitious parts of Biden’s campaign health-care platform would require Congress to provide consent and money. Those include creating a government insurance option alongside the ACA health plans sold by private insurers, and helping poor residents afford ACA coverage if they live in about a dozen states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs under the decade-old health law.
A White House spokesman declined to discuss the plans. Two HHS officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity about an event the White House has not announced, said Monday they were anticipating that the event would be held on Thursday.
According to a document obtained by The Washington Post, the president also intends to sign an order rescinding the so-called Mexico City rule, which compels nonprofits in other countries that receive federal family planning aid to promise not to perform or encourage abortions. Biden advisers last week previewed an end to this rule, which for decades has reappeared when Republicans occupied the White House and vanished under Democratic presidents.
The document also says Biden will disavow a multinational antiabortion declaration that the Trump administration signed three months ago.
The actions to expand insurance through the ACA and Medicaid come as the Supreme Court is considering two cases that could shape the outcome. One case is an effort to overturn rulings by lower federal courts, which have held that state rules, requiring some residents to work or prepare for jobs to qualify for Medicaid, are illegal. The other case involves an attempt to overturn the entire ACA.
According to the individuals inside and outside the administration, the order to reopen the federal insurance marketplaces will be framed in the context of the pandemic, essentially saying that anyone eligible for ACA coverage who has been harmed by the coronavirus will be allowed to sign up.
“This is absolutely in the covid age and the recession caused by covid,” said a health-care policy leader who has been in discussions with the administration. “There is financial displacement we need to address,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe plans the White House has not announced.
The reopening of HealthCare.gov will be accompanied by an infusion of federal support to draw attention to the opportunity through advertising and other outreach efforts. This, too, reverses the Trump administration’s stance that supporting such outreach was wasteful. During its first two years, it slashed money for advertising and for community groups known as navigators that helped people enroll.
It is not clear whether restoring outreach will be part of Biden’s order or will be done more quietly within federal health-care agencies.
Federal rules already allow people to qualify for a special enrollment period to buy ACA health plans if their circumstances change in important ways, including losing a job. But such exceptions require people to seek permission individually, and many are unaware they can do so. Trump health officials also tightened the rules for qualifying for special enrollment.
In contrast, Biden is expected to open enrollment without anyone needing to seek permission, said Eliot Fishman, senior director of health policy for Families USA, a consumer health-advocacy group.
In the early days of the pandemic, the health insurance industry and congressional Democrats urged the Trump administration to reopen HealthCare.gov, the online federal ACA enrollment system on which three dozen states rely, to give more people the opportunity to sign up. At the end of March, Trump health officials decided against that.
During the most recent enrollment period, ending the middle of last month, nearly 8.3 million people signed up for health plans in the states using HealthCare.gov. The figure is about the same as the previous year, even though it includes two fewer states, which began operating their own marketplaces.
Leaders of groups helping with enrollment around the country said they were approached for help this last time by many people who had lost jobs or income because of the pandemic.
The order involving Medicaid is designed to alter course on experiments — known as “waivers” — that allow states to get federal permission to run their Medicaid programs in nontraditional ways. The work requirements, blocked so far by federal courts, are one of those experiments. Another was an announcement a year ago by Seema Verma, the Trump administration’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that states could apply for a fundamental change to the program, favored by conservatives, that would cap its funding, rather than operating as an entitlement program with federal money rising and falling with the number of people covered.
“You could think about it as announcing a war against the war on Medicaid,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Dan Mendelson, founder of Avalere Health, a consulting firm, said Biden’s initial steps to broaden insurance match his campaign position that the United States does not need to switch to a system of single-payer insurance favored by more liberal Democrats.
The orders the president will sign “are going to do it through the existing programs,” Mendelson said.
HENRY KOTULA 