Can the ACA Cover Everyone?
Former Vice President Joe Biden has pledged to make health care coverage more accessible and affordable—through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), rather than by creating a Medicare-for-all system like his more progressive Democratic primary candidates proposed.
In a new opinion piece published in JAMA Health Forum, two School of Public Health researchers lay out concrete steps that Biden, if he wins the presidency, can take to fulfill that promise.
“Although many progressives will not be satisfied with incremental changes to health care financing, such an approach is considered likely if Biden is elected,” write Paul Shafer, assistant professor of health law, policy & management, and Austin Frakt, research professor of health law, policy & management.
But that doesn’t mean these incremental changes can’t have a huge impact, they write. Shafer and Frakt suggest more detailed strategies than what is currently in Biden’s plan, focusing on automatic enrollment and “getting employers out of the insurance game.”
Using mechanisms that some states already have, building off of one recent Trump administration change to the ACA, making a few bold changes slowly, experimenting plenty, and dropping a few elements of the Biden plan that won’t make real change, Shafer and Frakt write, a President Biden could inch closer to universal, affordable coverage without fundamentally rethinking the US healthcare system.
Read the full article here.