It was a few days ago when we learned that former President Barack Obama would return to the White House this week to help promote the Affordable Care Act on the heels of its recent 12th anniversary. It was poised to be Obama’s first visit to the White House since his successor’s inauguration in January 2017.
And while a great many officials seemed quite excited to see the former president yesterday, at the same event, Obama and President Joe Biden did more than just pat themselves on the back for a job well done. As NBC News reported, the White House made some policy news, too, unveiling a proposal to make more people eligible for premium tax credits to buy ACA marketplace plans.
The Treasury Department proposal would allow families to receive tax credits if their coverage costs exceed more than 10 percent of their incomes, a senior administration official told reporters. The change, scheduled to take effect in January, would allow 200,000 uninsured people to gain coverage and lower premiums for a million others, the official said.
“[S]tarting next year, working families in America will get the help they need to afford full family coverage, everyone in the family,” Biden said. “As a result, families will be saving hundreds of dollars a month.”
In health care circles, there’s a problem known as the “family glitch.” HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn explained:
[W]hen Obama administration officials first wrote the rules for implementing the Affordable Care Act, they decided that eligibility for the subsidized plans should depend on the cost of an individual employer policy, not a family policy. Individual policies usually cost a lot less than family coverage because they are for just one person. As a result, there are instances in which the family employer policy costs more than 9.6% of income but family members can’t get subsidized marketplace coverage because the individual employer policy costs less.
As a recent Politico report added, the White House set out to tweak existing regulations — a move that does not require congressional approval, which means it can actually happen — fixing the “glitch” and expanding benefits.
A senior administration official briefing reporters earlier this week said, “We think it’s the most significant administrative action to improve implementation of the ACA that we’ve taken since the law was first passed in 2010.”
Biden added at yesterday’s event that his is “one of the biggest things my administration can do to lower costs and expand coverage.”
The change won’t take effect right away — like every regulatory policy change, there’s a months long process, including a public comment period — but the administration expects the new policy to be in place starting in the new year.
What’s more, as we discussed on the anniversary of “Obamacare,” it’s the latest in a series of encouraging developments surrounding the health care reform law. As things stand, the ACA is working; it’s popular; it’s affordable; it’s withstood far too many legal challenges; and it’s providing health security to more Americans than ever before.
No wonder Biden and Obama seemed so happy yesterday.
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