Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden repeated one of former President Barack Obama’s broken promises, vowing that Americans who like their current insurance plans could keep them.
As the former vice president rolled out his proposal to add a public insurance option to the Affordable Care Act, he promised that it would let people keep their existing plans.
“If you like your health care plan, your employer based plan, you can keep it,” he said at a candidate forum in Des Moines, Iowa. “If in fact you have private insurance, you can keep it.”
In the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Obama helped assuage Americans’ concerns about the dramatic changes to come by promising, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
That turned out to be less than accurate. While the 2010 law allowed existing plans to be “grandfathered” in, any small changes meant that policies had to meet new standards and ultimately ended up being canceled by insurance companies. Millions of plans were canceled in the years immediately after the law was enacted and Obama eventually apologized for not being able to keep his promise.
Political consultants frequently point to Obama’s promise as exactly what not to do when offering a new proposal.
The vow Biden made Monday stems from his determination to maintain a robust private health insurance market even as other Democratic candidates are pushing for Medicare for All, which would do away with private insurance. Biden asked for a show of hands from the crowd at the AARP-Des Moines Register forum of people who like their current private plans or the ones they had before retiring. Under Medicare for All, they’d be told “finished, you can’t have it anymore. You cannot have it. Period,” he said.
Biden’s proposal, which would cost $750 billion over its first decade, would create a public option that Americans could choose instead of employer-based or individual plans. He’s not yet said how the costs and benefits of the public option would stack up to existing private insurance plans, nor how he’d ensure that existing plans would be kept in place even as a public option would change the insurance marketplace. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how he’d fulfill his promise.
Bloomberg News.